Black line drawing of a sugar skull with floral ornaments, heart-shaped eyes and a decorative scroll jaw, shown as a design on white.

Sugar skull line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing sugar skull design with a large central flower, scrolling leaves and small dots across the brow and nose. The eyes are drawn as lace-edged hearts with keyhole pupils, and the teeth are outlined in a grinning row. Bold, even black linework on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Skull Sugar skull Flower Heart Scroll Leaves Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sugar had gone past amber by the time Ada Penhallow noticed, and she stood over the copper pan with the wooden spoon held up like a witness in a dock. Too dark for the piece. Too dark for anything but the bin behind the Co-op, and the Dorrance order was due on the bus at six.

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Mrs Dorrance had come in on Tuesday with her husband's cap folded in her handbag. Thirty-one years on the coal face at Hollin Pit, she said, and he had never once been frightened of the dark, only of being left out of the joke. So he was to have a skull for the chapel shelf, sweet enough to eat and bright enough to be seen from the lane. Ada had said yes before she had thought about the sugar.

She started again with a lighter pan and a steadier hand. She piped lace around the eye sockets until they looked like doilies on a tin tray, drew the hearts inside them, then pricked the keyholes with a hatpin, a neat dark slot in each. Across the brow went a single flower with petals like a fist opening, and down the nose she dotted white icing in the pattern her mother had used on Sunday teacakes. Scrolls of leaves ran out to the cheekbones. The teeth she left plain, because the man had liked a laugh.

On the night the skull sat on the Institute windowsill with a paraffin lamp behind it. Light poured through the keyholes and laid two small bright doors across the whitewash. Mrs Dorrance touched the glass and asked what they opened. Ada didn't know, so she said the lane, and the coal shed, and the back gate, and the old man's chair, and the woman took it as the answer it was meant to be.