Colour tattoo of a sugar skull wearing a nurse's cap with a red cross, crossed syringes and script reading Registered Nurse est. 2013 on the upper arm.

Sugar skull nurse with crossed syringes

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull wears a nurse's cap with a red cross and is framed by two crossed syringes, with a pink and teal floral pattern on the forehead and yellow dotted eye sockets. Bold outlines and soft shading give the skull dimension, and the script lettering beneath reads Registered Nurse with est. 2013 in smaller text. The design is shown in pink, red, yellow and teal on a single upper arm, with the photo framed close to the tattoo.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Sugar skull Skull Script Floral pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Halloran pressed the sugar skull into your hand across the blanket, still wrapped in a page of the Lincolnshire Echo, and watched you unwrap it as if it might bite. His daughter had bought it at a fair in Liverpool. Pink icing bloomed on the cheekbones, yellow dots ringed the eye holes, and someone had piped a tiny red cross onto a cap of royal icing. You were twenty-six, the only qualified sister on nights at St Bartholomew's in Gainsby, and the ward clock ran seven minutes fast, as it had since the war. "For the lady who sat up with me," he said, and coughed the rest of the sentence into his handkerchief.

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You kept it on the shelf above the dressing trolley, between the enamel kidney dishes and the tin of spirit swabs. Through the long winter nights you watched the sugar face go soft at the edges as the ward heating dried it out. The sister in charge called it morbid. The porter called it a good luck charm and asked whether he could have the cap. When the crossed syringes came out of the steriliser each morning, you found yourself lining them up beside the skull's jaw before you wrote up the charts.

Mr Halloran died on a Thursday, a little before five, with his daughter asleep in the chair by the window. You sat with him until the cart came for the bed, then you went back to the sluice room, where the skull was waiting, slightly cracked along one cheek. You ate the crumbled cheek off your fingertip, the way he had shown you on the Tuesday, and you signed the night book in your neat hand with the time written beside it. Behind you the ward clock ticked on, seven minutes fast, as it always had.