Colour realism tattoo of a woman with sugar skull face paint, red autumn leaves and a keyhole on her forehead, on a calf.

Sugar skull portrait with autumn leaves on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A realistic portrait of a woman with sugar skull face paint, including a painted eye mask, stitch-like mouth lines and a small ornate motif on the chin. Red, orange and yellow autumn leaves frame her face, and a black keyhole sits on the forehead above fine black scrollwork. Soft shading and glossy highlights give the skin, lips and leaves a three-dimensional finish, set against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over the hill the week the beech leaves turned, and the first thing the children saw was the painted lady on the ticket wagon, her face half hidden by red leaves, a keyhole cut into her forehead where the paint had cracked. Ada Penrose sold the tickets from that wagon. Nobody had asked her to. The last woman had gone home to Carlisle and left the cash tin behind, and Ada had never been one to leave a tin unminded.

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Each evening a stranger came to the wagon and bought one ticket for the Hall of Keys, a tent with no lamps in it. Ada took the coin and gave them a brass key, warm from her apron pocket. Inside, the fairground people said, you could open any door you had shut on yourself. Most came out lighter. A man in a mackintosh came out weeping and paid twice. Ada never went in. She had kept the tent's padlock key on a string for six autumns and had never once turned it.

On the last night, the damp off the river had got into the paint, and the painted lady's eyes looked wet. A girl of nine, sent by her mother to find the tent, stood at the wagon with a shoe box under one arm. 'I can't open it,' the girl said. 'It's stuck. Will you do it for me?' Ada looked up at the keyhole on the panel and saw that the leaves around it had begun to flake away, one by one, as if the picture were emptying itself out.

She gave the girl the brass key. Then she plucked the last red leaf from the painted woman's cheek, tucked it into her own collar, and walked off down the lane with the cash tin under her arm, past the lamps going out. Behind her the Hall of Keys stood open with its flap undone, and the wagon sat bare with nothing on its face but a small dark hole where a door had been.

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