Two colour traditional tattoos on the ribs, left a sugar skull in a veil with flowers and right a skull in a top hat with flowers and the word DEATH.

Sugar skull bride and top hat skull on ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two side-by-side tattoos on the ribs show a sugar skull wearing a pink veil and gold-toned hair ornament, and a skull wearing a black top hat with the word DEATH beneath it. Both are framed by pink, white, yellow and orange flowers with green leaves. Bold outlines and solid fills give a flat, classic colour finish, and the two designs are placed close together across the torso.

Traditional Ribs Skull Sugar skull Bride Veil Top hat Flower Rose Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Winnie Carrow had kept the hearse waiting outside St Agnes for eleven minutes before anyone noticed the bride had not come out of the vestry, and by then the whole of Gulls End was standing in the drizzle with its umbrellas folded.

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Hester had gone to the back of the church to fetch the lace veil her mother had worn, and found instead the undertaker's black top hat on the hook where Ambrose always left it. Nobody in the parish had ever seen him without it. He had buried half of them in that hat, and he said a man could tell a good funeral from a bad one by whether the brim sat level when he walked back down the path.

She came out with the veil over one arm and her shoes in her hand. "He's under the lych gate," she told the vicar, "and he's crying, and I am not going up there in my stockings." Ambrose was on the stone bench with his face in his gloves. He had rehearsed his vows for thirty years over other people's husbands, he said, and every one of them had sounded like a promise. Hester sat down beside him in the wet. "Then say the one you wrote on the back of the order form," she said.

He read it out badly. It was about roses that would outlast the pair of them, and it was written small beneath a sketch of a skull in his order book, a joke he had meant until it stopped being one. She laughed, and then he did, and when they walked back up the path together the hat sat level and the veil was pinned with white roses from the wreath. The vicar, who had married a great many people in that church, swore afterwards it was the first wedding he had seen where nobody looked as though they were attending a funeral.