Colour traditional tattoo of a sugar skull with a red rose across its forehead and pink flower eyes, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with red rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull is tattooed on the forearm, with a red rose and green leaves across the top of the skull and a small pink rose at the base of the jaw. The skull has teal shading, decorative pink flowers in the eye sockets, a black heart-shaped nose and a toothy grin with orange and pink details. Bold black outlines frame the bright, saturated colours against a plain dark background.

Traditional Forearm Sugar skull Skull Rose Leaves Flower Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Abuela never let me pick the marigolds before the first of November, and even then only the orange ones, whose sharp smell stayed on my fingers until bedtime. The rosebushes along the back wall were not hers. They belonged to Mr Okafor next door, who had traded her cuttings for mint since the summer we moved in, and who every evening leaned on the fence to ask whether the dead had been fed yet.

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That year she made the sugar skulls at the kitchen table, pressing white paste into moulds and leaving them to harden on newspaper by the radiator. I was given the brushes. Teal first, thinned with a drop of water until it looked like the sea on the postcards propped on the dresser. Then pink flowers for the eye sockets, petals counted out loud, and a heart cut into the nose, because she said a skull needed one soft thing to show it had been loved. When Mr Okafor's wife died in September, Abuela sat up three nights to finish his skull, and she would not let him see it until it was on the table with the roses already painted across its brow.

He came round at dusk with his hat in his hands and didn't speak for a long time. Then he reached out and touched one red petal with his thumb, carefully, the way you test whether paint is dry. "She always wanted the roses in the middle," he said, "not tucked round the side where nobody looks." Abuela said nothing. She only pushed the plate a little closer to him.

The following spring the cuttings he had given us came up in our yard, eleven of them, and the first bud opened on the Saturday before the festival. I carried it over to the fence in both hands. Mr Okafor was already waiting on his side, the way he had every evening since September, and when he saw the flower he laughed once, quietly, and said that the middle was exactly where it ought to be.