Black and grey sugar skull tattoo with a curled handlebar moustache, decorated with paisley and floral patterns, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with a moustache

Black and grey · Photo

A black linework sugar skull with a curled handlebar moustache across the mouth. The skull is filled with paisley, scrolls and flower motifs, and the large round eyes are solid black with fine dotted shading. The design is shown in close-up on a smooth area of skin against a plain, soft background.

Skull Sugar skull Moustache Paisley Floral Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come down on Saltergate market since Tuesday, and by Friday the paper marigolds on Maud Fennick's stall had gone soft as wet bread. She sold sugar skulls for the Sunday fair. Sugar was the one thing the damp could not spoil if she kept it under oilcloth. Her best was a skull with a moustache, a curled handlebar she had piped herself from a hot spoon of sugar, and she set it at the front of the trestle where anyone could see it grinning.

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A man in a green oilskin stopped to look at it most mornings. He never bought it. He said the moustache was vain, and that a skull ought to have the decency to be bare-faced. Maud told him the skull had been a magistrate in a previous life and was entitled to a bit of dignity. He laughed and walked on. On the seventh morning he did not walk on. He stood with water running off his hat brim and asked the price, and she said a penny. He said he had only a halfpenny. She said that would do, provided he promised to keep the moustache waxed.

He carried it home in his coat, wrapped in a page of the Gazette. The fair was never held. The river rose that Sunday and carried the stalls down to the sluice gate, and Maud's oilcloth went with them. Nobody saw the skull again, though the man in oilskin was seen at the sluice with a bucket of cold tea, and a woman's voice from an upstairs window told him to mind the rain.

Years later his wife, who had no patience for ornaments, dusted the mantel every Friday and never once took the sugar moustache down. She said it was the only thing in the house that had never drooped, and that in forty winters of damp it had kept its curl like a man who meant it.