Colour tattoo of a black sugar skull cat with pink roses, green bones and red hearts on a person's upper back, in a neo-traditional style.

Sugar skull cat on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A seated black cat with a painted sugar skull face sits in profile, with pink roses on its ears and eye sockets, and a curled tail. Its body is filled in solid black with green, red and cream skeletal bones and small red hearts over the ribs and spine. The bold outlines and saturated colours stand out clearly against the smooth skin, and the image is taken at a slight angle.

Neo-trad Back Cat Sugar skull Day of the dead Rose Heart Bone Skeleton

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You go down to the harbour before the gulls are awake, paint tin under one arm and the cat trotting ahead as if he owns the quay. Nobody else in Porthkennick paints a cat's face for the dead, but your mother did it every November, and her mother before her, so you do it too, on the chandlery door and on the iron bollard where Pilchard likes to sit.

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Pilchard is black as a dropped boot, all of him, until you give him the cream bones along his ribs and the sugar skull over his face, with pink roses bursting from his ears and the sockets of his eyes. He sits where Tom used to sit, facing the mouth of the bay. Tom's boat, the Mary Ann, went out on the Tuesday ebb and has not come back through the gap. The lifeboat men have stopped coming to the kitchen with their caps in their hands.

You rub the paint into the bones with your thumb, the way you were shown, and count the small red hearts, one for each night he has waited. Eleven. The tide turns. Out past the Carrick rocks a light blinks, stops, and blinks again, and the cat's tail lifts like a question.

By noon the Mary Ann is alongside, her pots stacked high and Tom grinning through a split lip, saying the engine quit off the rocks and he rowed the last four miles. You do not tell him about the cat. You put the paint away and lift Pilchard onto your shoulder, and he is warm, and the roses on his ears have smudged a little where he rubbed against your hair.