Colour tattoo of a blonde pin-up woman with sugar skull face paint and a red flower in her hair, with black and grey scrollwork below, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull pin-up with scrollwork

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman with flowing blonde curls and a red flower above one ear is shown in profile, with blue and purple sugar skull face paint, green eyes and red lips. Her hair and face are rendered in smooth, blended shading with bright yellows, reds and blues. Below her, grey and black ornamental scrollwork with shaded edges frames the composition against the skin.

Neo-trad Upper arm Woman Sugar skull Day of the dead Flower Blonde hair Pin-up Scrollwork Face paint

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

We lost the figurehead somewhere south of the Horn, the same week the cook started counting tins. Nobody aboard the Marigold had carved her, which was the first puzzle, and the second was the paint. Someone had given her blonde curls lacquered as yellow as a seaside postcard, a red hibiscus tucked above one ear, and a face half skull and half sweetheart, the cheeks worked over in blue scrolls like frost on a bottle.

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I found her in the wash at dawn, wedged against the cutwater with her grey acanthus leaves still clamped to the bow. Mr Pruett wanted her burned for luck, but the boatswain's boy gets the lamp locker, and I had the lamp locker. So she rode out the rest of the Pacific wrapped in a spare sail, and every night I unwrapped her, turned her to the lantern, and told her what the crew were saying about her.

At Valparaiso the dock women came down to the quay on the first of November with marigolds in their hair and candles in jam jars. One old woman in a black shawl saw the bundle under my arm, lifted the corner, and laughed until she coughed. My grandmother painted faces like that, she said, for the people who had gone on ahead of us. You don't hide a face like that from the sea. You give it something pretty to look at while it makes up its mind.

We bolted her back on at Liverpool in a thin grey rain. Pruett stood at the rail and said nothing, which from him was a blessing. Off the bow the scrollwork caught the light and held it, and for the first time in four months I thought the sea might have to take a second look before it came for us.