Pencil sketch of a woman in profile with a sugar skull face, wavy hair, two roses and scrolling foliage, a design in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull profile with roses

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing in profile shows a woman whose face is detailed as a sugar skull, with ornamental patterns over the eye and cheek. Two open roses sit among wavy, shaded hair, and scrolling acanthus-like foliage fills the lower part of the sheet. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and grey, with no colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind that lamp, Rosa, you'll have the sugar scorching. Tomasa wiped her hands on her apron and looked at the sheet pinned above the bench, the one the buyer from Puebla had sent back three times. He wanted the face to be a little less death and a little more lady, he had written, though he never said which of the two he meant.

Keep reading

Rosa had spent the whole of Tuesday scraping a cheek of the mould with a bent knife until the pattern sat flat. The skulls her family sold on the Calle de las Flores always faced the front, grinning at the customers. This one was to turn in profile, hair swept back in long waves, two open roses tucked above the ear. Rosa took a pencil from behind her ear and drew the scroll of acanthus leaves that would fill the bottom of the sheet, the way her grandmother had taught her to curl them before the sugar set.

On the third morning the buyer came back himself, shaking rain from his hat. He held the drawing to the window for a long time. Then he laughed, a short surprised sound, and said the roses were the only part that looked alive. Tomasa told him the skull had been made to keep the roses company, not the other way round, and he paid double for the mould and asked for the sketch as well.

Rosa watched him fold it in four and tuck it inside his coat. Behind her the lamp had gone out, and the sugar in the pan had cooled to a dull gold. She did not tell Tomasa that she had drawn the roses first, before the face, and had not once thought of the skull while she did it.

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