Black and grey sugar skull tattoo with a cross on the forehead and roses on the upper arm.

Sugar skull with cross and roses on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large sugar skull fills the upper arm, with a cross on its forehead and ornate scrollwork across the skull. Roses with leaves sit on the shoulder and at the lower left of the skull. The shading is soft and detailed, rendered entirely in black and grey ink against the skin.

Realism Upper arm Sugar skull Skull Cross Rose Scrollwork Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses in the walled garden above Vallecito grew too well, and every Sunday Ignacio Brava went up the hill with his pruning knife to hold them back. His wife Luz had planted the first bush the spring they married, against the south wall where the sun lingered. When she died, Ignacio buried her beneath it, and the roses took her the way roses take anything, by climbing. By the third summer they had pushed through the stones into the churchyard next door, and the priest complained that the lilies could not breathe.

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Amparo the sugar-maker came up the hill each November, as she always had, with a tin of pale sugar and a sieve of icing. She made skulls for the dead, one for each family who asked, and she set a small cross on each brow so the visitors would know which door was theirs. Ignacio stood in her kitchen turning his hat in his hands. He asked for a skull with roses at its cheek and a cross at its brow, and he asked for the scrollwork Luz had liked on the church doors. Amparo told him sugar does not keep. He said it only had to keep one night.

On the last night of the festival he set the skull on the garden wall, facing the path, and lit a candle in its open jaw. He sat with a jug of wine until the candle guttered. When he woke, the wall was bare of sugar. Ants had carried the scrollwork away grain by grain, and a single rose had been cut and laid in the empty eye, its stem still wet.

Ignacio looked at the cut stem for a long time. The next spring he did not go up the hill with his knife. He let the roses come over the wall, and when the priest complained he only said that the dead had always been greedy for flowers, and that Luz had never once asked him to hold anything back.