Pencil drawing of a sugar skull tattoo design with roses, a diamond on the forehead and decorative swirls, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with roses flash design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a sugar skull with a diamond on its forehead, ornate filigree on the cheeks and eye sockets, and a cluster of roses above and below. The linework is fine and the shading is soft grey, with curling stems and leaves framing the composition on a plain white background.

Sugar skull Skull Rose Diamond Leaves Swirl Filigree Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The narrowboat Sorrel Mare had carried coal, then bricks, then for twenty years the dead of one family, because that was the custom on the Stour. Old Ada Penhallow kept a painted skull on the cabin door for each of them. She said the skull was not for death but for remembering faces, and she painted white flowers in the eye sockets so the children would not be frightened.

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The winter the ice came early, her husband Tom went through it at the sluice gate. Ada did not cry on the towpath. She pressed his wedding ring into the plaster of the skull's brow, set a small diamond from her mother beside it, and told the river it could keep the gold if it gave back the rest of him. The river gave back a boot and nothing else.

That spring, roses came up through the cracks in the cabin roof, where she had tipped the cuttings from his coat pocket. The lock keepers said they were stubborn, that they climbed higher than any rope had a right to. Ada let them climb. Their stems curled over the gunwale and down the side of the hull, and the leaves crept round the brass fittings until the boat looked like something left out in a garden.

When her granddaughter Nell came aboard to learn the tiller, Ada handed her the brush and said the skull was ready for a new face. Nell painted a small fish in the centre of the forehead, just under the diamond. Ada never asked what it meant. That summer the water rose over the towpath, and the roses bloomed on the roof above the flood, and the Sorrel Mare rode out the high water with her painted skull facing the way she had always faced.