Black and grey flash design of a sugar skull wearing a top hat, with an ace of spades, dice, a star, roses, crossed pistols and an eight ball, with the numbers 1969 below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull in top hat with cards, dice and roses

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A sugar skull wearing a top hat sits at the centre, with an ace of spades on its brim and dice beside it. Roses, a nautical star, crossed pistols, an eight ball and the numerals 1969 surround it in a symmetrical layout. The work uses bold outlines, fine hatching and soft grey shading on a cream background.

Neo-trad Traditional Skull Sugar skull Top hat Playing card Dice Star Rose Pistol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Wren,

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The dice came up sevens again at Halcyon Deck last night, and a man from the Ganymede rigs wept into his brandy because he'd staked his mother's water ration on a single ace. I dealt him the card myself. The ace of spades, black as a cargo hold, the same one Grandad Tobias kept tucked in his hat band the whole way out from Earth. He said it was for luck. I think it was for remembering that every hand ends somewhere.

The rooms here are kept at a steady nineteen degrees all year, which is the only honest thing about the place. The hum from the pumps sounds like a crowd settling in to watch. At the change of shift I count the pistols on the wall rack, six of them, their grips wrapped in spider-thread lace that the old crew swore kept the hands steady. Nobody has fired one since the strike. They hang crossed above the bar like a warning nobody reads.

The eight ball sits on my desk now, scuffed nearly to the bone. Grandad always said the number mattered less than the nerve to call the pocket. Nineteen sixty-nine was the year the first long lines reached the outer stations, and everyone believed the sky would be easy after that. I still keep the stamped ticket from that voyage folded in the lining of his case, and it has never once lied to me about the odds.

Come home at midwinter if you can. Bring the pale roses from the grow-bay, the ones that won't survive the transfer, and we'll sit at table four while I teach you to read a face the way he taught me. Don't bet anything you can't lose. Keep the ace.

Love, Mags