Black and grey pencil drawing of a woman with sugar skull face paint, pin-up and skull motifs, and a corset, shown as a neo-traditional tattoo design.

Sugar skull pin-up figure drawing

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey pencil drawing of a woman in profile with sugar skull face paint, flowing hair and a corset-style bodice. Her arm and chest are covered in pin-up portraits, roses, two skulls within a burst of rays, and script lettering reading Dead Love. The shading is soft and graphite-like, with strong contrast against a pale background and the figure filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Traditional Sugar skull Woman Pin-up Skull Rose Corset Script Spider web Heart

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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

Sit down, sit down, those sports hall chairs have been waiting forty years for someone to take the weight off them. You want the story of Marjorie Pitt? Everybody here has a version, but mine has the spider web in it, because she was the only girl in Year Eleven who could draw one so well you'd swear it trembled when the fire doors banged.

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She drew on everything: exercise books, the back of the dinner register, the inside of my satchel. Pin-up girls with their hair piled up like a wave about to break, skulls with sugar-spun faces grinning at Mr Hollis's algebra. Her mum ran the Co-op on Calder Road and kept a tin of Day of the Dead candles in the stockroom that nobody else was allowed to touch. Marjorie said the dead were only ever waiting for someone to notice them.

The summer we left, she came to the bus shelter with a pencil case full of ink and asked which of us was brave enough to have a heart drawn on us. Dennis Ogle said he'd do it for a quid. Marjorie said she'd do it for nothing, but only if he let her choose the words. She wrote DEAD LOVE across his forearm in that looping hand, and he wore it a week until his mother saw and made him scrub at it with Vim.

Dennis is over there by the urn, bald as a boiled egg, showing his grandson the faint grey ghost of it still under the skin. Marjorie went to art college in Leeds and never once came back for a reunion. So go on, ask him to show you the letters. They're still there, if you know where to look.