Colourful sugar skull design with round ears, floral patterns, heart-shaped eyes and roses on a black background, drawn as a flash-style illustration.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull with round ears and roses

Colour · Flash

A sugar skull design with a round, rounded-ear outline, filled with floral motifs, scrolls and leaves in pink, orange, purple and blue. The eyes are blue flowers inside yellow-outlined heart shapes, and a heart-shaped nose sits above a toothed grin, with bold outlines and flat colour fills. Large purple, pink and orange roses frame the lower edge against a plain black background.

Sugar skull Skull Flower Rose Heart Scroll Leaves Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses along the back wall had come in early that year, and Abuela Consuelo said it was the dead pushing up through the soil to see who had been pruning them. I was nine and believed her. Every November she sat me at the trestle table under the lemon tree with a bowl of sugar, a cracked tin of food colouring and a jar of egg white, and we made skulls for the people who would be coming home.

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The moulds had to be packed tight or the sugar crumbled at the seams. Consuelo pressed the paste in, turned each skull out onto squares of greaseproof paper, and let me do the decorating. I made the ears round because I had seen a cartoon mouse on a neighbour's tea towel and thought it was the most cheerful shape a head could have. She laughed so hard she had to hold the table, then made me pipe the cheeks in pink, one petal at a time, until my tongue poked out of the corner of my mouth.

The year she was too tired to leave her chair by the window, I finished the batch alone. I piped hearts into the eye sockets, a blue flower in the middle of each, and a small heart for the nose. When the last one was drying on the sill, I set it among the orange roses in the yard so she could see it from where she sat.

She lifted one hand off the blanket and pointed at it, then at me, and said that one was for her grave. I told her she could not have it, because I had given it a grin. She laughed again, and it was the last time I heard her do it. The following spring the roses came up thick along the back wall, and I cut the first bloom and set it beside the skull on the sill, where the light could reach it.