Black and grey realism tattoo of two sugar skulls, one with curled hair and a flowered hat, on an upper arm, with a script lettering piece in a second panel.

Sugar skull couple on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The main panel shows a large black and grey tattoo of two sugar skulls, one wearing a flowered hat and the other with curled hair, framed by ornate scrollwork. The skulls use smooth, realistic shading with fine detail in the eyes, teeth and decorative patterns. A smaller close-up panel shows a shaded script name tattoo on skin, and the bottom right panel repeats the main arm view.

Realism Lettering Upper arm Sugar skull Skull Hat Flower Curly hair Scrollwork Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skulls were already on the bench when I came down the stairs, two of them, sugar white and cracked at the crowns, the way Marisol had left them the winter she went to her sister's in Puebla and didn't come back. I had told Tomas at the ice house I could only paint hulls. He said a hull was just a face with less opinion, and he left me the brushes anyway.

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The first skull was hers. I gave her the flowered hat she wore to chapel, the little paper blossoms on the brim that she stitched herself at the kitchen table while the kettle boiled over and she swore in two languages. The second I gave curls, the ones I used to wind around my finger while she told me I was too slow for the kettle. Every scroll came out of the margin of her recipe book, the one with a water stain shaped like Ireland.

By the third night the harbour lights were on and the gulls had stopped arguing over the bins. The paint dried tacky in the damp air, so I worked by the stove with the door open, listening to the boats knock together at their moorings. I did the teeth last, every one of them, because she always said a man could be forgiven anything except a rushed smile.

When the parade came down the quay I carried the pair of them on a board above my head. Children ran alongside waving paper flags. Tomas stood at the bottom of the steps and said nothing, for once. I set the board on a bollard, and the wind off the water lifted one paper blossom from the hat and carried it out past the breakwater, toward wherever she had gone.