Colour tattoo of a crescent moon with a sugar skull face, roses and sparkling stars on the upper back, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull moon with roses on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A crescent moon forms the outline of a sugar skull, decorated with ornate scrollwork and framed by red roses with green leaves at the lower edge. Four-pointed sparkle stars sit on a soft purple wash in the upper left. Bold black outlines and smooth shading in green, purple and pink give the piece a vivid, graphic finish on lightly freckled skin.

Neo-trad Back Moon Crescent moon Skull Sugar skull Rose Star Leaves Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marta, the moon has been wrong since we crossed the line. It hangs over the foresail as a thin silver crescent, and every night it grows fatter on the wrong side of the sky, the way a thing does when someone has turned it round to hide its face. Captain Ruiz says it is only the trade wind playing with the glass. Tomas, the powder boy, says the moon has taken the shape of a skull so the dead can keep an eye on us. I told him the dead want marigolds and not bread, and that is the last thing I have said to him in four days that he has agreed with.

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I have been making sugar skulls with the last of the ship's sugar, which is a foolish use for it, but the cook owes me for the sea chest I mended. I pack the sugar into a mould I carved from pearwood in Callao, press it, let it set in the lamp heat, then crack it out with a dry thumb. Every one comes out with the same grin, and the grin always looks a little more like the crescent than it did the night before. I have kept the best one wrapped in oilcloth under my bunk, meaning to give it to you at the dock. The roses are painted on with cochineal from the galley and a goose quill, and they are the only red we have left.

Last night the swell came over the rail and I went down to fetch the skull, and the oilcloth was soaked through. The sugar had gone soft at the jaw, the eye sockets had slumped into one another, and the moon in the porthole looked for a moment like a face that had finally stopped pretending. I laughed until Tomas came down the ladder to see whether I had fallen overboard.

I have dried it by the stove and it is hard again, though the teeth are gone. Tell Mama I am keeping the grin. Land is nine days off if the wind holds. Your brother, Alejo.