Two forearms held together showing a traditional style sugar skull with red roses and a swallow on one arm, and a woman's face with roses on the other.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull, roses and swallow on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are pressed together towards the camera, both covered in tattoos. One arm shows a grey sugar skull decorated with flower motifs, a bold red rose and a black and red swallow, while the other shows a woman's face framed by dark hair and strings of pearls, with a red rose below. The bold black outlines and flat red fills are set against grey shading, and the dark shirt behind the arms keeps the focus on the artwork.

Traditional Forearm Sugar skull Skull Rose Swallow Woman Flower Pearl Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Listen, you lot, and mind the fire, because this is the bit where the old king's daughter stops being sensible. In the kingdom of Harrowmere, where the river runs backwards on feast days, there lived a mask-maker called Ysolde Penn who carved skulls out of sugar and sold them to the pearl-sellers on the Lantern Steps. Her skulls were grey as wet slate, and she painted every one with red flowers, because she said the dead liked a bit of colour at their supper.

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One autumn a swallow came in off the sea with a knot of red thread tied to its leg. Nobody in Harrowmere kept a swallow that wasn't somebody's messenger, so Ysolde unpicked the thread and found a name written on a scrap of sail-cloth: Marrow. She knew the name. It belonged to the sea-captain who had promised to marry the pearl-seller's girl, Hanne, and had sailed away owing three months' rent and a single rose. Ysolde set a fresh skull on the harbour wall, painted its eye sockets red, and tied the thread to its jaw where the swallow could find it.

Hanne came down the steps the next morning with her hair full of pearls and her face set hard, as if she meant to shout at the sea. She stood beside the skull for a long time. Then she took a red rose from her own sleeve, pushed it between the grinning teeth, and said the captain had always been a poor liar and an excellent drinker, so she would drink instead.

The swallow never came back. But every spring after, a red rose turned up on the harbour wall, and Ysolde never once asked who had left it.