Traditional style colour tattoo of a dog's head decorated like a sugar skull, with floral eyes and a red tongue, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull dog head on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A dog's head, resembling a pit bull, is decorated with sugar skull motifs including white flower shapes over the eyes and green leaves on the brow. The bold black outlines are filled with pink nose, red tongue and blue-grey shading, with a small web pattern on one ear. The design is centred on a forearm against a plain light background.

Traditional Forearm Dog Sugar skull Flower Leaves Tongue Spider web

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dog on the Whirligig banner has been losing its paint since Margate, and you are the one who has to climb the ladder with a pot of enamel and a brush that smells of turpentine. Dolores Finch, who owns the Cavalcade Fair and little else she can afford, says the mutt was a gift from her late husband, so it stays. You paint the eyes first. Fat white blossoms, the kind the sugar stalls sell at Easter, one over each socket, and a cluster of green leaves pricked along the brow like someone's careful handwriting.

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Nobody comes to the Cavalcade for the rides any more. They come for the dog, Bruno, a rescue from a yard outside Hull, who will lean his big square head into any hand that offers a ginger biscuit. He has a pink nose the painter got slightly wrong, a red tongue that lolls out over the lettering, and a spider's web on one ear, which Dolores swears was there before the paint. You stopped arguing about the web years ago.

On the last night of the season the wind takes the canvas off the dodgems and rolls it into the ditch, and you find Dolores sitting on the caravan steps with the banner across her knees. She is scratching behind Bruno's ears. The paint on the flowers has cracked clean across, and beneath the cracks the original white shows through, bright as a plate.

You tell her you will mend it in the morning. She says there is no morning for the Cavalcade, only the next town, and she folds the banner the way you fold a flag, corner to corner, and hands it to you. It is heavier than it looks. Bruno sighs and rests his chin on your boot.