Two colour tattoos of sugar skull portraits, one on a calf and one on a forearm, with script lettering below the forearm piece.

Sugar skull portraits on calf and forearm

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two female portraits with sugar skull face paint are tattooed on a calf and a forearm, one with a dark blue hair flourish and an orange flower ornament, the other with a fiery orange and pink backdrop. The faces use smooth, blended shading with fine ornamental linework on the skull patterns. Colour dominates, with blues, pinks, oranges and yellows, and script lettering sits below the forearm piece.

Realism Neo-trad Calf Forearm Sugar skull Portrait Woman Skull Flower Flame Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mared had been boiling sugar since before the boats came in, and by the time the lamps were lit along the quay her hands were sticky to the wrist. The festival of the dead was three nights off. Every house in Porthkerry set out a skull for someone the sea had kept, and every skull had to be finished by hand, with a wire of icing around the eye sockets and a lace of blue across the brow.

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Her daughter Nell wanted to paint the faces instead of piping them. "Blue for the sea," she said, "and the other one for the boat that burned off the point." So they made two. The first they crowned with marigolds and gave a river of dark hair that ran off the table onto the flagstones. The second they wreathed in orange flame, pink as the inside of a shell, and Nell painted its cheeks with a brush no thicker than a hair.

On the third night the wind swung north and the bay went flat as a plate. Mared carried the skulls down to the slipway. Her husband had been on that boat. She set the blue one on the stones and kept the burning one a while longer, turning it so the lamplight caught the scrollwork, and then she wrote his name in wet icing along the base, the way the old women did, so the water would know who to answer.

The tide took them both before the lamps had burned down. In the morning a fishing line had snagged the blue one by its hair, and it hung off the harbour wall like a rope somebody had forgotten to cut. Nell left it there. Her mother said nothing, and the gulls kept clear of it all that week.