Black line drawing of two sugar skulls, one in a veil and one in a top hat, framed by roses and a banner reading 'Til Death Do Us Part, in a traditional tattoo flash style with no body placement

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull couple with roses and banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two sugar skulls side by side, one wearing a veil and the other a wide-brimmed top hat, with roses across the top and bottom. A ribbon banner across the lower half reads 'Til Death Do Us Part. The linework is bold and even, with simple hatching and solid black areas, and the composition is symmetrical and centred on a white background.

Traditional Sugar skull Skull Rose Banner Veil Top hat Couple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the fire, the wind's got no manners tonight. I'll tell you how the Quarrie light came to be kept by two skulls, though the Board never wrote it down. Mabel Quarrie came out to the rock in the spring of the great gale with a loaf of wedding bread in one hand and a veil she'd cut from the lamp-room muslin in the other, because the mainland parson would not row out in that sea. Tobias Rennie stood on the iron gallery in his dead father's top hat, the wide-brimmed one that blew off twice before he tied it down with a bootlace.

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The parson's boat went over before it reached the landing, so the vows were said plain, the two of them facing each other with the lamp turning over their heads. "Till death do us part," Mabel said, and Tobias said it back, and then a wave came over the rock and soaked the pair of them to the bone. That was the start of forty years of keeping the light. They climbed the spiral stair with oil cans and cold tea, argued over the wick every night, and never once argued over the lamp.

Then Tobias took a fever in the back end of a February, and the Board sent word they'd have him off the rock on the first calm day. He would not go. "The light's mine till it's yours," he said, and he died on the Tuesday with his hat hung on the peg by the door. Mabel wrapped the hat in her veil and climbed the stair every night after, winding the clockwork by hand when it stuck, and the fishing boats in the Sound swore the Quarrie light always had the gleam of two lamps in it.

When the relief boat came in June, the lamp was still burning and the wick was trimmed. Mabel was sitting at the glass with the veil across her knees and the hat beside her, the two of them looking out at the water as if waiting on a boat that was late. The Board wrote that the light was kept, and for once they were not wrong.