Line drawing of a sugar skull with a pompadour hairstyle, a cigarette in its mouth and a scrolled banner, in yellow and orange tones on a gradient background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with pompadour and cigarette

Colour · Flash

A stylised skull with a swept-back pompadour, sugar skull swirls and a cigarette between the teeth, drawn as fine outlines in pale yellow and white. Dark orange shading and a mottled orange-to-red gradient fill the background. Yellow banners frame the skull on either side, with a scrolled ribbon and ornamental motifs across the bottom of the composition.

Skull Sugar skull Cigarette Banner Swirl Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Sallow Creek ever paid Ezequiel Ruiz in coin. They paid him in the hour before dusk, when the dead came up the river road for their Sunday shave, and he had to have the pomade warm and the strop ready before the first knock. He kept the shop on the bridge, with its red-striped pole gone pale from the sun, and he never once asked a customer where he had been.

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The first one that year was a fiddler named Bartolo Prieto, drowned in the spring flood and still wearing his good yellow waistcoat. He sat in the chair with his eyes closed, which was courtesy, and asked for the pompadour swept back the way it had been in 1954, when he played the dance hall above the mill. Ezequiel combed the hair up into a wave, stiff with tallow, and worked the swirls onto the bare cheeks with a fine brush of white paint. Bartolo took the cigarette from between his teeth, looked at the unlit end for a long while, and said his daughter Lupe still kept the bow in a drawer and would not open it.

Ezequiel asked what he owed. Bartolo told him to play one tune on the bridge at midnight, any tune, and let the river hear that the fiddle was not lost. So Ezequiel took down the old box from the wall and played badly until the water stopped its running for a breath.

In the morning the step of Lupe's house held the fiddle, its strings singing in the wind, and beside it a single cigarette, lit and burnt down to the filter without a mark of ash.