Black and grey sugar skull tattoo with roses and leafy vines across the upper back, shown from behind.

Sugar skull and roses on upper back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large sugar skull is the central subject, decorated with a diamond in one eye socket, a heart in the other, an ankh on the forehead and scrollwork across the cheeks and jaw. Three roses and trailing vines with leaves frame the skull and extend up towards the neck and down towards the lower edge of the design. The bold outlines are filled with black and grey shading, and the photograph is taken straight on, showing the design across the upper back.

Traditional Back Sugar skull Skull Rose Vine Leaves Diamond Heart Ankh Cross Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps have found the windfalls by the time you reach the bottom row, and Abuela Teodora is already at the packing shed with her sleeves rolled, pressing wet sugar into the clay moulds she carried over from Oaxaca forty years ago. You stack the trays in the cool before the sun clears the hedge. Each skull has to dry overnight, and by morning the crust must be hard enough to take a fingernail of black icing without cracking.

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By the harvest supper they stand in a row on the trestle under the damson trees, grinning with their jaws of white sugar. Teodora sets a clear boiled sweet into the left socket for a diamond and a red heart into the right, then pipes an ankh across the forehead in royal icing because your grandfather Tomás brought the shape home from Alexandria on a cargo ship and never once explained it. She tells you that the sweetness is only there to make the dead willing to come close, and you believe her because the wasps have stopped bothering the trays.

The boy from the next farm, Dev, wants the one with the diamond. You say no, it is promised, and then you give it to him anyway when he asks for the third time, because the afternoon is hot and nobody in the orchard is keeping count. Teodora watches him run off down the lane with it held out in front like a lantern.

At dusk you find the heart skull sitting alone on the shed step, its icing gone soft at the edges, a single wasp walking slowly across its cheek. You do not brush it off. You leave the lamp on for the rest of the night, so the light can get in through the empty socket.