Traditional-style sugar skull tattoo with a pompadour hairstyle, a cigarette and red flowers on an upper arm, with the words Rockin N Rollin and N What Not.

Sugar skull with pompadour on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sugar skull wearing a black pompadour hairstyle and a dark collar, with a cigarette between its teeth, fills the upper arm. Bold black outlines, grey and black shading on the hair and skull, and red flowers and a red lightning bolt give it a bright accent. The lettering Rockin N Rollin arcs across the top and N What Not sits below the skull, framing the design against the skin.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Sugar skull Skull Cigarette Flower Lightning bolt Lettering Collar

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the seventh year of the dry, when the wind had taken the last of the wires from the poles along the Cold Road, a man walked out of a storm carrying a guitar made of tin. His face was a painted skull, marigold red around the eyes, and his hair stood up off his forehead in a black wave that the dust could not settle on. He lit his cigarette from a lightning bolt, and the people of Sallow Bend said afterwards that it was the only light they had seen in a year that did not hurt to look at.

Keep reading

The mayor's daughter, Nell Brisk, asked him what he wanted for his music. He said he wanted nothing but a floor that did not shake and a room with enough people in it to make the walls sweat. So they cleared the feed store, swept the grit into the gutters, and hung oil lamps from the rafters. He played three songs that first night, and each one was about someone who had gone east and not come back.

On the fourth night a boy named Tobias Greer asked why he never took off his dark collar. The skull laughed, a sound like a spoon dropped in a tin bucket, and said the collar was there to keep his heart from rattling loose. Then he took the cigarette from his teeth and gave it to Nell, who had never smoked, and told her to hold it until the song ended. She held it. When the last chord died the cigarette was still burning, but the man was gone, and by the door stood a pair of black shoes, polished and empty.

Sallow Bend still dances on the first night of the storm season. They call the rhythm the Rolling, and they say it keeps the lightning from coming down close. Nell kept the cigarette in a tin box on the mantel until she died, and it never once went out.