Black ink drawing of a sugar skull skeleton woman with a hair bun, hand fan and cigarette, on a parchment-coloured background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Sugar skull skeleton lady with fan

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a skeletal woman with a sugar skull face, a decorated hair bun and a ruffled dress. She holds an open hand fan in one hand and a cigarette with curling smoke in the other. The linework uses fine hatching, stippling and solid black areas on a textured beige background.

Skeleton Sugar skull Cigarette Smoke Hair bun Day of the dead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Hollins Cut swore she came up the towpath every first of November, and Dad, who had never believed a word the man said, still bought the marigolds. We moored the narrowboat Patience below the old tannery and set a candle in the cabin window, the way Nan used to for the dead folk she called her people, though she was Yorkshire born and had never crossed a sea in her life.

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She came at dusk on the third night. I heard the fan first, a soft clack like cards being shuffled, then saw her on the bank with her bones bright under the lamp, a bun piled high and pinned with a tortoiseshell comb. Her black frill lifted in the wind off the water. She did not speak. She lit a cigarette from nothing and leaned on our mooring rope as if she had paid for it.

Dad came out in his vest with the boathook. She looked him over, then tapped her ash into the cut. 'You kept the candle going,' she said, in a voice like a gate closing slowly. 'Nobody has kept one for me since the war.' Dad said he had only lit it for the marigolds. She laughed, a dry clatter, and snapped her fan shut before she walked off up the towpath, her skirts rustling like paper.

In the morning the candle had burned down to a neat little cup. On the sill beside it sat a sugar skull with my father's name piped across its forehead in gold, and Dad, who had never believed a word of it, picked it up very carefully and did not put it down all day.