Black and grey sugar skull portrait in an ornate frame, with a red rose on a top hat and red accents, shown as a tattoo on skin.

Sugar skull portrait in ornate frame

Neo-trad · Mixed · Photo

A sugar skull figure in a top hat with a red rose wears a spider web design and dark eye makeup, looking to the side within an oval cameo. The ornate scrollwork frame surrounds the portrait, with smooth grey shading and fine detail across the face and clothing. Red ink is used for the rose, the stitched mouth, the cravat and the eye detail, with the rest in black and grey.

Neo-trad Realism Sugar skull Portrait Top hat Rose Ornate frame Cameo Spider web Day of the dead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The portrait came out of the frame that October, and Mrs Oduya swore the cameo had been empty when she hung it in the back parlour of the Crouch End lodging house. Nobody believed her except the lodger in the attic, a sign-painter named Tobias Fenwick, who had sat for it in the spring and never once looked at the camera. He stood on the stairs now with a candle, watching the figure in the top hat lean forward out of the oval as though to read the newspaper on the hall table.

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"You'll want to put it back before the lamplighter comes round," Mrs Oduya said. "Folk talk."

Fenwick took the frame down himself. The painted rose on the hat was bright as a fresh cut and the stitches across the painted mouth had a sheen of wet red. He had not used red ink on that portrait, only grey and black, and he said so. Mrs Oduya asked him what he thought he had used, and he did not answer, because the rose had been painted over with a second rose, and the cravat was darker than it had been at noon.

He carried it up to the attic and turned it to the wall. In the morning the frame hung above the washstand, facing the window, and the figure was looking out at the rooftops of Hornsey Lane with the same patient, sidelong curiosity it had worn in the studio. Fenwick painted the shop sign that week for a funeral parlour on the high road, and when he finished, the gilt lettering read a name that was not his own.