Colour traditional-style sugar skull tattoo with a pink flower on a man's forearm as he holds a tray of coffee cups.

Sugar skull tattoo on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a sugar skull with a red and pink flower on top of the head covers the forearm and runs toward the elbow. The skull has bold outlines, solid fills and a heart-shaped eye socket, and the background is a plain, slightly blurred street. The arm holds a wooden tray with six grey cups of espresso and one latte with leaf-shaped latte art, set against the man's white T-shirt.

Traditional Forearm Sugar skull Skull Flower Heart Coffee

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Saturday. Rain all morning on the market, the awnings sagging like wet sheets and my little espresso van steaming up from the inside so I could barely read the till. Nobody wants a coffee in weather like this unless they are desperate or in love, and Bev from the fruit stall says there's no difference.

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At half past eleven a man ducked under the tarpaulin with his collar up and asked for six espressos and a latte. I assumed he was buying for a crew. He carried the tray to the trestle himself and set the cups out in two neat rows, handles all turned the same way, like a man laying out cards. Then he put the latte at the end, the one he'd asked me to finish with a leaf in the foam, and he sat down on an upturned crate and waited. Nobody came. He didn't touch the espressos. Once a gull got under the awning and he shooed it off without looking up.

At closing he was still there, the rain running off the brim of his cap. He tipped the six espressos into the gutter one at a time, slowly, as if each one needed its own goodbye. The latte he left. The leaf had gone soft and grey at the edges by then, but he said it had lasted longer than he'd expected, and he thanked me for the cups. I washed them after he'd gone, all seven, and I'm keeping the tray. It's on the shelf by the sugar, and every morning I count it without meaning to.