Flat teal sugar skull design on a coral background, with flower-shaped eyes, scrolled forehead detail and a fleur-de-lis between the brows.

Sugar skull design in teal and coral

Colour · Flash

A symmetrical sugar skull drawn as a flat vector silhouette in teal, with coral negative space forming the details. The eye sockets contain large layered flower motifs, and scrolls and a fleur-de-lis sit across the forehead above a stylised nose and a toothy grin. The image is centred on a plain coral background with no shading or gradients.

Sugar skull Skull Flower Scroll Fleur-de-lis Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sugar would not set in the damp, so Inés carried the moulds indoors and laid them along the windowsill where the afternoon sun could reach them. Her grandmother had cut the first of them from a clay pattern that split in the second winter, and the replacement ran thin at the brow. Every October the same complaint came from the square: the scrolls were too fat, and the fleur-de-lis looked like a tulip with a grudge.

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She tinted the icing with prickly pear for the coral and with indigo for the teal, though the indigo always greyed by morning. The miller, Don Ramiro, came for his skull the day before the bells. He wanted his name pressed into the forehead in letters the children could read from the road. Inés said she had no room for letters, only scrolls and a flower in each socket, and that a skull with a name was a skull that had to be forgiven something.

He took it anyway, wrapped in a cloth, and paid her in copper. The next evening his daughter came to the orchard gate with the skull held out in both hands, a little soft at the nose where the damp had got to it. She set it on the wall beneath the pear tree where her mother was buried. The sun was still warm on the stones. By dark the petals in the eye sockets had slumped, but the teeth and the crooked grin held, and the scrolls on the brow were the last thing to go.