Colourful sugar skull design surrounded by magenta flowers, gold leaves and swirling stems, drawn as a tattoo flash design with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with magenta flowers

Colour · Flash

A decorated sugar skull sits at the centre of the design, with patterned white face markings, heart-shaped eye sockets and a heart-shaped nose. Magenta dahlia-like flowers, small blue blossoms, gold leaves and curling black-outlined stems frame the skull from top to bottom. The bold, even outlines and flat areas of colour sit on a plain white background, with the composition arranged symmetrically down a tall central axis.

Sugar skull Skull Flower Leaves Swirl Heart Dahlia Day of the dead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had been playing the same bolero for an hour because nobody had told the trumpeter the second set was meant to start. You stood by the cloakroom hatch with a paper cup of warm cider and watched Nell Ardagh dance with a man in a borrowed tailcoat, her dahlias pinned crooked above one ear. The hall smelled of candle wax and spilt lager, and someone had hung paper skulls from the balcony rail, grinning down at the floor as if they knew the steps.

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Nell had made you promise on the stairs that you would not mention the sugar. Her mother had pressed white paste into moulds every October for the Day of the Dead supper, and the last tin of them had gone stale at the back of the pantry in Sheffield. "They're for eating, not keeping," Nell said. "Like everything else in this building." Then she laughed, turned to take her partner's hand, and the cider slopped over your fingers.

Near midnight the lights dropped and the trumpeter finally got his second set. You found yourself at the edge of the floor with Dougie Plaistow from the bakery, who had sworn he could not dance and then did, badly and joyfully, a box step through the fringe of the crowd. Somewhere behind you the hatch banged open and a woman shouted for more ice. Nobody looked round.

At two the caretaker began stacking chairs, and Nell came over with her shoes in one hand. She pressed a small hard thing into your palm: one of the skulls, broken at the jaw, its heart-shaped eyes still painted blue and orange. "Keep it," she said. "Somebody should have a souvenir of the night we didn't have to pay for." You slipped it into your coat pocket, where it stayed, soft at the edges, until the next October came round and you found it again.