Colour realism tattoo of a woman with sugar skull face paint, red floral ornaments and blue watercolour splashes on a limb.

Sugar skull portrait with watercolour splashes

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A woman's face is shown in the style of a sugar skull, with black swirling linework and red floral ornaments around the eyes and chin. The face is rendered with realistic shading, including detailed blue eyes and red lips. Blue, teal and orange watercolour washes spread across the background and the fabric-like shapes at the lower edge, on a limb photographed against a black background.

Realism Other Sugar skull Face paint Floral ornament Swirl Watercolour splash Day of the dead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Teodora had mixed the blue three times before it held. The first batch went grey in the heat off the tin roof, the second bled into the paper like a bruise, and the señora was already waiting at the stall with her sister's photograph folded inside a handkerchief. Every autumn the marigolds came down from the hills, and every autumn someone wanted a face that looked less like a skull and more like the woman who used to sing in the church choir.

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She painted the white crust of the sugar skull first, then the black swirls that curled out from the brow like smoke from a snuffed candle. The red florets around the eyes she left until last, because the señora asked for them to look like the petals her sister had pinned in her hair. Teodora did not ask about the hair. She had learned that the dead keep their own details and will tell you what they want when they are ready.

Rain came at four, as it always did in September, and the paper went soft under the wash. The blue ran down past the cheekbone and into the collar of the drawing, and for a moment Teodora thought she had ruined the whole morning. Then the señora laughed, a short surprised sound, and said that was exactly how her sister had looked coming out of the lake at Hierve, all water and colour and no hurry about it.

They hung the portrait on the altar anyway, the watercolour spreading like a tide across the bottom edge. By morning the marigolds had dropped their petals onto the wet paper, orange on blue, and nobody moved them.