Coloured drawing of a grey sugar skull with a purple diamond, purple roses, olive leaves and small flowers on a grey paper background, shown as a tattoo design.

Sugar skull with purple roses

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A sugar skull is centred with a purple diamond on its brow and purple flower patterns in the eye sockets. Two purple roses with olive-green leaves frame the skull, with small purple flowers scattered around it. The skull is shaded in grey with dark linework, and the roses and leaves use bold purple and olive tones on a textured grey background.

Traditional Sugar skull Skull Rose Leaves Flower Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The van's radiator boiled somewhere past the salt flats, so I walked the last eleven miles of the Ruta Seca with a crate of skulls on my hip and my aunt's voice in my head telling me not to lick my fingers. Each skull was a sugar shell the size of a fist, set with a paper-thin brow jewel cut from boiled glass. The purple came from elderberry and a pinch of alum, and it would not survive the rain, which was why nobody sold them after October.

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A woman was waiting at the cross where the road forks toward Santa Ines. She wore black, carried a bucket of wilted roses, and asked, before any hello, whether I had brought the one with the crooked eye. I had. Her husband had ordered it years ago and died before it came, and she wanted it set on his grave tonight, the roses pinned round it so the ants would have something to argue over.

I found it in the crate, the one with the jagged left socket where my aunt's knife had slipped. I held it up to the light and the diamond on its brow caught the sun. She took it without a word and pressed a coin into my palm. Then the wind came up off the flats and scattered petals across the road like handfuls of wet confetti, and she laughed for the first time, saying he had always hated a tidy funeral.

I drove home by moonlight with the crate empty and the coin warm in my pocket, and I never did get the radiator fixed.