Black line drawing of a woman's face in sugar skull style, with a rose at the upper left, a spiderweb over the forehead and long flowing hair, shown as a tattoo design on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull portrait with rose and spiderweb

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a woman's face decorated in Day of the Dead sugar skull patterns, with dotted and scalloped detailing around the eyes and cheeks. A large rose sits at the upper left, a spiderweb is drawn across the forehead and scrolls and dots fill the lower face, while long hair frames the outline. The image is drawn in clean, uniform linework on a cream background with no shading or colour.

Sugar skull Woman Rose Spiderweb Portrait Hair Day of the dead Scrollwork Dotwork

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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

By eleven the stencil sheets were curling on the drying rack above the bakery ovens, and Mrs Okafor still hadn't collected her order. I had cut the skull three times. Each time the cheek scallops came out a shade too round, like the edges of a biscuit someone had pressed with a thumb, and each time I scraped the card and started again while the radio murmured the shipping forecast to nobody.

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The spiderweb was what kept me at the bench. Grandad had shown me how to lay a web across a forehead so it followed the brow rather than fighting it, one thread bending at the temple as if a draught from the window were pulling it. I had the rose done within the hour, its petals stacked like folded envelopes, and the dots I could do blind, a hundred pinpricks punched with the awl in the rhythm of a clock. But the web kept sagging over the left eye, and I couldn't tell whether the fault was my hand or the paper.

Near midnight the bell over the shop door went, though nobody was there, only a moth knocking against the glass under the streetlamp. Its wings had the exact shape of the web I'd been failing to draw. I pinned the card flat, laid the stencil over it, and cut the thread where it wanted to break. The shape held. In the morning the sheets went into an envelope for the parade, the rose still uncut in the corner where I'd set the knife down.