Black and grey drawing of a woman with sugar skull face paint, a rose in her hair and a second rose beneath her face.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull portrait with roses

Black and grey · Flash

A profile drawing of a woman with closed eyes, sugar skull face paint around the eye and jaw, and a rose tucked into dark flowing hair. A separate sketched rose sits in the lower right of the frame. The linework is loose and pencil-like, with soft grey shading on the face and a textured grey background.

Woman Sugar skull Rose Portrait Hair Earring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The drawing is finished, and I think it's the best thing I've done since Mum's kitchen wall. Mrs Okafor brought in her mother's photograph on Tuesday, but she didn't want the face looking like a photograph. She wanted the lines to stay loose, the way you'd sketch at a bus stop, and she wanted the roses drawn twice, once tucked into the hair and once lying by themselves at the bottom, as if someone had dropped one on the way out.

I sat with the pencils for three evenings. The white paint I used for the skull markings is the kind you buy for cakes, and it cracked as it dried, so I went over the jaw four times with a finer brush. Mrs Okafor said her mother hated fuss, which is why I kept the eye shut and the earrings simple, two hoops and nothing else.

On Thursday she came back with a tin of sugar roses from the baker on Carver Street and asked me to put one in the drawing too. I said there wasn't room. She said there was always room for a rose if you were sloppy about the shadows. I told her she sounded just like her mother. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the step.

I'm sending you a photo of it on my phone, though it won't show the grain. Come up at Easter and I'll show you the original. Bring the good pencils.

Love, Jess