Black and grey sugar skull tattoo surrounded by roses, leaves and a butterfly, shown on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with roses on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull with a decorative eye and a heart-shaped nasal area sits at the centre of the design, framed by two roses, leaves, a butterfly and fine scrollwork. The linework is dark and fine, with soft grey shading that gives the skull and petals some depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a pale forearm, with the wrist and hand visible at the upper right of the frame against a plain white background.

Botanical Forearm Skull Sugar skull Rose Leaves Butterfly Scrollwork Spider web

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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

Mind the step, it's glazed over, and don't lean on that gate, it's older than your grandfather's temper. Come nearer the grate where I can see your faces. Now. You'll want the one about Ivy Calloway and the skull on the windowsill, not the bull one, there's too much swearing in it.

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Ivy lived alone at the top of Scaithe Farm, past where the lane gives up, and she made sugar skulls the way other women knit socks. Every November she'd pour the white paste into moulds and press a rose into each brow, a little heart cut out for the nose, a scroll for each cheek. Amos, her husband, had been dead since the beck froze in February, so she made him a skull that spring with a painted eye like a pocket watch. She set it on the sill facing the moor, with a paper butterfly pinned beside it and a web strung across the glass so the cold wind had something to tangle in.

Winter came down hard that year. The roses by the back door blackened, the ewes stood with their heads down in the snow, and Ivy sat up each night talking to that skull as if it were the kettle. The spider in the web came down every morning and sat on the sugar, and the flies that gathered there went into its silk. The sugar, which should have stayed hard as bone, went soft and glossy in the thaw.

When the first lambs came in March, Ivy went up to the sill and found the skull picked clean of its roses, the eye left alone, and the butterfly sitting on the stone with its wings open to the sun. She took a spade to the frozen bed by the door, planted the last of her bulbs in the warm mud, and by summer there were roses climbing the wall, pink as a child's cheek.