Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with roses

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A side-profile sugar skull with decorated turquoise and brown eye sockets, a yellow-toothed grin and a patterned blue and pink crown is surrounded by orange roses and green leaves. Bold dark outlines define the skull and flowers, with solid colour fills and some shading on the bone and petals. The design fills the frame diagonally, with the skull on the left and the flowers wrapping around its right side.

Traditional Other Sugar skull Skull Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marisol had been piping the same sugar skull for eleven years, and every November the old man who sold coffee from the cart by the fish quay asked her why she never made the teeth any different. "Teeth are teeth," she told him, scraping the last of the yellow icing from the nozzle. The skulls went into the window of Brannock's bakery in rows, each with its turquoise eyes and its crown of little blue scrolls, and the harbour children pressed their noses to the glass as if the sugar might bite.

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Then the spring the herring boats came in short, a stranger came asking for Marisol by name. He was a tall man with a sea-bag and a clipboard, a surveyor for the council, and he wanted to know why the bakery kept a skull on the sill all year round. She didn't understand him at first. He tapped the glass. The skull had been there since the winter, dried hard as bone, because nobody had the heart to eat it and nobody had the nerve to throw it out.

She took it home that evening wrapped in a tea towel. At the kitchen table she picked at the crust of the orange roses she'd piped around its jaw, and found under them a name scratched into the sugar by a child's finger, and a date from the year her mother died. She sat there until the harbour lamps came on across the water. In the morning she went back to the bakery and asked for a fresh tray of icing, and she piped the teeth different, with a gap at the side for the smile to show through.