Two hands held together, each showing a black and grey sugar skull tattoo with dotted detail on a finger, one with a ring on another finger.

Sugar skull tattoos on two fingers

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two sugar skull designs are tattooed on the middle segments of two adjoining fingers, with the skulls facing the same way. The linework is dark and outlined, with dotted and floral patterns filling the skull and hearts visible on the upper skull of the left finger. The ink is black and grey, and the photograph is taken close up against a plain dark background with a ring on a third finger.

Dotwork Hand Sugar skull Skull Flower Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every October Teodora Ruiz poured sugar into her moulds in the back room of the church hall in Santa Rosalía, and every October the skulls came out grinning and dusted white. Her husband had carved the moulds before the war. The best of them had lace worked round the cheekbones, a row of dots along the jaw, and a small heart pressed into the brow. No other mould in the valley had one like it.

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That year two cousins, Ana and Beto, quarrelled over it. They had shared a bench at school and a bottle of pulque at every wedding, but in the spring Beto's father sold the mule and Ana's father took the lease on the well, and after that neither would share so much as a sugar bowl. Each wanted the heart-browed mould for his own. On the morning of the feast they came into the hall shouting, and Teodora put down her spoon and told them to sit.

She pressed two skulls side by side on one tray, the same lace, the same dots, a heart on each brow, and set them down with their faces turned the same way. "The mould is one mould," she said. "Your hands made the sugar, so you may each take a skull, but you must carry them to the graves together." The cousins looked at the tray and then at each other. Beto laughed first, and Ana, who had never been able to keep a straight face, laughed after him.

They walked to the cemetery that evening with a skull each, bumping elbows on the lane, and set them on their grandfather's stone facing the same way. By morning the rain had softened the lace and the hearts had run into the dots, but the two skulls still sat together, and nobody in Santa Rosalía could tell which one had come from which cousin's hand.