Pencil drawing of a sugar skull with diamond-filled eyes, framed by two shaded roses and leaves, as a tattoo design on sketchbook paper.

Sugar skull with roses pencil design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a sugar skull with diamond motifs in its eye sockets and a small ornamental motif on its forehead. Two shaded roses and several leaves frame the skull, with a further rose-like bud below. Bold black outlines and grey pencil shading give a black and grey finish on a textured off-white sketchbook page with spiral binding visible at the left edge.

Neo-trad Sugar skull Skull Rose Leaves Diamond Filigree Bud

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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

The lamp room smelled of paraffin and wet wool the morning I found the sketchbook, wedged behind the spare mantles where my father kept things the inspector was not meant to see. Outside, gulls walked the gallery rail one at a time, as if they were waiting for a bus.

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The drawings were in pencil, pressed hard, the sort of work done at a kitchen table while the tide made. Roses with their petals ruled in, leaves veined like road maps, and a skull grinning from the middle of them all. Its eye sockets held diamonds, shaded so carefully I could almost feel the glint. Beneath it, in capitals, someone had written FOR THE BOY AT TROY'S. Troy's had been a tattoo parlour above a chip shop in Penzance. My father never once mentioned it.

I took the bus down on the Thursday with the book inside my coat. The chip shop was a vape shop now, but the woman at the bakery remembered a lad called Eli who drew better than he inked, and who sailed out one February and never came home. His mother still kept his sketches in a biscuit tin. She let me trace the skull onto greaseproof paper and said nothing about my father, which was its own kind of answer.

That night I climbed the one hundred and twelve steps and sat in the lamp room with the original open on my knees. At twelve seconds past nine the great lens turned and the diamonds flashed across the page, brief and white. I understood then that the light had never been only for ships.