Flash-style drawing of a sugar skull face on a matryoshka doll body, with red roses, a cross and a diamond on a black background.

Sugar skull matryoshka doll design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A black matryoshka doll silhouette holds a cream sugar skull face with red floral eye sockets, a small inverted cross on the forehead and a grinning row of teeth. Below, red roses, cream leaves, a white diamond and fine swirling scrollwork fill the black body, with a radiating striped halo behind the head. The clean outlines and solid red and cream fills on black give it a bold, graphic look.

Neo-trad Sugar skull Skull Cross Rose Diamond Swirl Scrollwork Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

At the frontier post below Dolna Brzeza, the guard Tomas Halka lifted the sixth doll from the old woman's basket and turned it over in the lamplight. Its black skirts were scrolled with white vine, and a ring of red roses ran round the hem. Open it, he said, the way his sergeant always said it, and she did. Inside sat a fifth doll, smaller, with the same roses, and inside that a fourth, and so on down until the seventh was no bigger than a barley grain and still wore a painted face.

Keep reading

Her name was Zofia Vrana, and she had walked the forest road with those dolls every autumn since her husband went over the hills for work and did not come back. She had painted every one herself, she said, and the faces belonged to the people who had lent her their last coins. The skulls grinned because they were honest. Tomas asked what the small cross on the forehead meant. She shrugged. It was upside down so the dead could read it.

He counted the dolls twice, as the rules required, and found them correct. Then he saw that the seventh was hollow at its base, with a paper scroll pressed inside. It was a list of villages on his side of the river, each with a sum written beside it, in a hand he knew from the back of his grandmother's prayer book. He had not seen that hand since the funeral.

He stamped her papers and held the gate. Behind him the lamp swung, and she packed the dolls back one inside another, the smallest going in last, and the whole set closed with the soft knock of wood finding wood.