Colour tattoo of Hello Kitty styled as a sugar skull, with a pink bow and black outlines, on the upper shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull Hello Kitty on a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A Hello Kitty face is tattooed in a sugar skull style, with ornamental swirls across the cheeks and forehead and a skull patterned into the pink bow. The design uses bold black outlines with pink, red, yellow and green fills, and the heart-shaped eyes sit in teal and yellow rings. The tattoo fills most of the frame on a shoulder, with a grey top visible at the right edge.

Neo-trad Shoulder Hello kitty Sugar skull Bow Cat Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marisol,

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The rain got into the stall again on Saturday, so every sugar skull I'd painted that week went soft at the edges and I spent the afternoon under a tarpaulin, scraping icing off the trestle with a butter knife. You'd have laughed. A man from the bins stopped to ask whether the cat was a real cat, and I said yes, she lives under the stall and eats the leftover pink paint. He bought a bag of bows instead.

The bows are what I keep thinking about. I'd made a dozen Kitty faces for the kids who come on Saturdays, black outlines and red ribbons, and then Teodora's boy asked if he could have a little skull tied into his bow, right where the knot sits, as if the ribbon had been wrapped around it on purpose. I told him that was the rule. Sugar skulls are for remembering, not for being frightening, and Kitty never once looked afraid of anything in her life.

Tomorrow the market is shut for the car park resurfacing, so I'm walking up to the canal with the spare tins to paint whatever the water tells me. Don't worry about the rain. It only makes the colours run the way they do on the good ones, a little yellow bleeding into the teal around the eyes. Come home at Easter if you can. I'll save you the one with the crooked whiskers.

Love, Inés