Black and grey sugar skull tattoo with floral patterns, scrollwork and an eye in a triangle, shown on the upper leg.

Sugar skull with floral detail on a limb

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey sugar skull tattoo fills most of the frame, with flower-shaped eyes, a heart-shaped nose and a grinning row of teeth. Floral motifs and curling scrolls decorate the cranium and jaw, and a small eye within a triangle sits above the nose. The bold outlines and solid black fills are set against lightly lit skin, with a blurred indoor background.

Blackwork Other Sugar skull Skull Flower Scroll Eye Triangle Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and pass the bread before your cousin eats the lot. Now, the sugar skull on the bride's table, you've all been staring at it since the soup. Let me tell you where it came from, because it did not come from the bakery on the high road, whatever the baker's wife says.

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Years back, in the village above the salt flats, there lived a sugar-maker called Inés Ruelas, who made skulls every October for the dead to nibble on. Her hands were white to the wrist all year round. One evening a widow came up the lane carrying a shoebox and a bundle of pale blue silk, and she said, Inés, my husband wants to see his daughter married, and he was never one for waiting. Make him a face he can stand to look at. So Inés worked through the night, pressing sugar into moulds, painting the eye sockets with a thread of black treacle and cutting marigold petals from paper for the centres.

Near dawn she set a little triangle above the nose, with an eye inside it, because her grandmother said a watching eye keeps honest the people who make promises. The widow took the skull, paid in eggs and salt, and went down the hill without a word. The wedding was held in the square a week later, and the skull sat on the long table beside the bride's gloves. When the vows were spoken, a moth landed on the sugar eye and would not leave until the last glass was drained.

The widow never came back. But every October since, Inés leaves one flower on the church step, and nobody in this village has ever broken a promise made in that square. So eat your bread, lift your glasses, and mind the moths.