Colour traditional-style sugar skull tattoo decorated with red, blue and purple roses and green leaves, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull is tattooed on the outer thigh, filled with red, blue, purple and teal roses and leaves, with a floral pattern across the forehead. Bold black outlines define the skull, teeth and scrollwork, and the colours are solid with soft shading on the bone areas. The skull sits centred on the thigh against a dark background, with denim shorts visible at the top of the frame.

Traditional Thigh Sugar skull Skull Rose Leaves Floral Scrollwork

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the candle. No, the bride's aunt will not mind you taking a sliver of the marzipan, not yet. The wedding of Inés Carrasco and the baker's son was meant to be the grandest thing in the valley that October, and the grandest thing was supposed to be Tomás's skulls. He had pressed eleven of them from sugar and egg white, every one in a mould his grandfather carved from pear wood, and the night before he painted them with a brush of camel hair no thicker than a fishing line.

Keep reading

Then the rains came early. The damp got into the sugar, the jaws sagged, and by dawn only one skull was whole, the one with blue roses spilling across its teeth and a purple bloom sitting on its brow like a crown. Tomás's mother had called him a fool all year for wasting his money on sugar, and she said so again, loud enough for the whole kitchen to hear. He didn't answer her. He carried that one skull out to the cake table in both hands, as carefully as a man carrying a lit lamp, and set it at the door where every guest would pass.

The dancing went on until the lanterns guttered. Near midnight the bride's grandmother, who could barely see her own feet, asked to be led to the table. She ran one dry finger over the painted forehead, over the rose petals and the little teal leaves, and said that a thing made to be broken is the only thing worth making well. Nobody knew whether she meant the sugar or the marriage.

In the morning the sun came through the kitchen window and lit the skull until the blue roses looked wet. Inés wrapped it in a dish towel, tucked it into her bag, and carried it home to her own door. It sat on her sill for sixty years, and her children were never once allowed to eat it.