Colour neo-traditional sugar skull tattoo with dark red roses, a green vine and a spade on the upper arm.

Sugar skull with roses on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull wears an ornate purple hat with a central eye, and has orange flower-shaped eye sockets, a spade in the nose and a green vine wrapping across the face. Bold dark outlines hold smooth colour gradients and soft shading, with dark red roses filling the lower right. Swirling teal, blue and orange bands fill the background around the skull, and the design is framed against a black backdrop.

Neo-trad Upper arm Sugar skull Skull Rose Spade Eye Vine Flower Hat Ribbon Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spade comes up third from the bottom, face out, and you feel the old woman's breath stop on the far side of the table. Mrs Pryce has paid you a week's takings to hear that her husband is coming home from the trawlers, and the card in front of her says otherwise. Behind you the harbour bell knocks against the wind coming off the Cobb, and the gulls over the fish quay sound like they are laughing at the pair of you.

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You have read cards on this quay for eleven summers, long enough to know the cards are not the trick. The purple hat, the green vine laid across the bones, the dark red roses your uncle painted on the caravan door: they are all there to make a stranger lean in. You tap the spade with one nail and say, "The sea keeps what it is owed," which was your mother's line, and which is true enough to sell.

Then the lantern swings on its hook and its light slides through the torn gap in the canvas, catching the blue glass bead you wear on a cord. For a second the painted eye in the hat seems to open. Mrs Pryce sees it too. She stands so fast her stool goes over, and she is past the bunting before you can tell her the rest.

Later, sweeping up, you find the spade has been turned over by somebody's careless hand. On its back, in soft pencil, is a grocer's list: rope, paraffin, one ring to be mended. Nobody reads the back of a card. You slip it into your apron pocket, pull the flap closed against the wind, and go to find out whether the boats are in.