Black and grey line drawing of an ornate sugar skull framed by three roses and feathered leaves, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Sugar skull with roses tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed ink drawing of a sugar skull with scrollwork across the forehead and cheeks, and roses filling the eye sockets. Roses and feathered leaves surround the skull, with a larger rose at the base. The linework is fine and dense, with cross-hatched shading, and the image is entirely black and grey on a white background.

Sugar skull Skull Rose Feather Leaf Scrollwork

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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 skull had hung above the ticket booth since before I was born, its sockets stuffed with paper roses gone the colour of weak tea. Mr Vole called it the Lady, though nobody could say why, and when the big top came down in Ledbury he told us to strike everything except her.

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Our numbers had been falling for three seasons. The lion went first, then the tightrope family, then Dolores with her feathered headdress, who ran off with a dentist from Hereford. What was left was me, sewing sequins back onto costumes that no longer had anyone to wear them, and Mr Vole counting coins from a biscuit tin at the back of the caravan.

On the last night he asked me to fetch the Lady down. Her paper petals had rotted at the edges, and when I lifted her they came away in my fingers like ash. Behind the eyes, a card he'd pasted there years ago read in faded capitals: FOR THE ONES WHO STAY. I didn't understand it until I looked through the flap and saw three children and their grandmother still waiting at the gate, the lamps burning, the band playing the same waltz it always played.

I pinned fresh roses into her sockets, red wool and wire, and carried her out into the empty ring. We danced, badly, the two of us, while the children clapped. Mr Vole watched from the wagon steps with his tin in his lap and, for once, did not count a thing.