Black ink drawing of an ornate sugar skull design with diamond eyes, a cross on the nose and a spider web across the crown, shown on cream paper.

Sugar skull with diamond eyes

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing sugar skull design with diamonds set into the eye sockets and a diamond above the nose, along with stars, a cross, a spider web on the crown and a small flower on the jaw. The linework is bold black with fine hatching and dotted detail, and the ornamental swirls fill the forehead and cheeks. The design is drawn in black ink on cream paper with no colour.

Sugar skull Skull Diamond Cross Spider web Star Flower Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Coyle counted the boats in from the bar every evening, and every evening one was short. The Mary Ellen had gone out on the ebb with four men aboard and come home with three. The fourth, a boy called Tobias Reeve who was seventeen and smelled of tar, had not come home at all. The sea had kept him, the fleet said, and Nan agreed with them until the autumn the nets came up heavy with stones.

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The stones were not stones. They were cut glass, clear and hard, caught in the mesh like handfuls of frost. Nobody on the quay would touch them. Old Harker said the sea paid in such things when it owed you, and Nan said the sea owed nobody, and then she carried a sack home and sat by the range with a paraffin lamp, turning them over until the wick guttered and she had to trim it with her thumbnail.

On the third night somebody knocked. Tobias stood on the step with water running from his hair and a grey thing cradled in his arms, a skull no bigger than a loaf, its brow painted with black tracery and a web spun over the crown. Its eye sockets were full of the same cold light. He did not speak. He set it on the table, pressed two of her glass stones into the sockets as neatly as a man setting buttons, and went back out into the rain. The door stayed open behind him, and the wind smelled of salt and of something sweeter, like sugar left too long in the sun.

At first light the Mary Ellen came round the point with her hold full and four men at the rail, Tobias among them, as if he had only been on the far side of the bar. Nan went down to the quay and counted them twice. Then she went home, took the skull from the table, and set it in the window where the lamp would catch the diamonds. No boat from that fleet has been lost since, and a cross is painted fresh on her lintel every spring.