Black and white sugar skull design with floral scrollwork, a cross on the forehead and flowers around the eye sockets, shown as a tattoo flash drawing.

Sugar skull design with flowers and cross

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black and white illustration of a sugar skull with a fully patterned face. Flowers, leaves and curling scrollwork fill the cranium, and a cross sits above the nose between two heart-shaped motifs. The eye sockets contain five-petalled flowers framed by dotted scalloped borders, and the teeth are drawn as separate rounded shapes against solid black areas.

Sugar skull Skull Flower Cross Scrollwork Heart Leaves Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been drumming on the glass roof of the covered market since six, and Nell Hardacre had already shifted the buckets of chrysanthemums twice. The marigolds were the real trouble. Their orange heads hung heavy and bruised at the edges, and nobody bought flowers that looked like they had given up. She stood under the stall's awning, counting coins into a tin, waiting for someone desperate enough to pay full price.

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At twenty to twelve a man in a yellow fishing cape stopped at the stall and shook water off his hood. He wanted flowers for a grave in Harehills and did not haggle. Nell wrapped the marigolds in brown paper gone soft with damp, then reached under the till for the sugar skull she had meant to keep. Her gran had piped it years ago, the icing gone chalky, a white cross drawn above the nose and two small hearts beneath it, dots ringing each socket like raindrops on a puddle.

He read the cross and smiled. 'My mam would have liked that,' he said. 'She always said the dead want something sweet and something bright.' Nell thought of her gran at the kitchen table, flour on her cardigan, teaching her to hold the piping bag steady and never rush the petals. She said nothing for a moment, then tucked the skull into the paper beside the stems.

He pressed a fiver into her hand and refused the change. When he had gone, the rain eased to a thin tapping, and a bar of pale light slid through the roof onto the wet cobbles. Nell tipped the rest of the marigolds into the bin, already noticing the gap on the shelf where the skull had sat, and found that for once it did not bother her.