Black outline sugar skull tattoo with a cross and flower motif on the thigh, with cursive script lettering above it.

Sugar skull with script on thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A sugar skull outline is tattooed on the outer thigh, with a cross on the forehead, a flower at the top of the skull and scalloped detail on the cheeks. Partial cursive script runs above the skull, and the photograph is taken from a casual angle with a pair of sneakers visible in the background. The work is done in a single black line with no shading or colour fill.

Thigh Sugar skull Skull Cross Flower Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hydroponic bay on the Halden ring smelled of wet soil and warm copper, and Ines was late with the marigolds again. Dolores would have had something to say about that. Every Hallow night the forty households carved a skull from the grey clay and set it on the long table in the commons, and every year somebody had to grow the orange flowers that would lead the dead home. Ines had the seed trays under one arm and the stencil under the other, the paper one her grandmother had carried up from the old ground, its edges gone soft from handling.

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She found the crate at the back of the seed store, under a sheet of foil. Inside were printed skull sheets meant for the children to colour, and on the top one someone had written in the cramped hand the first settlers favoured: 'all those we lost are here'. The rest had flaked away when the paper came out of the cold hold. Ines ran her thumb over the loops that remained and thought that the words were the only part of the sheet that had ever truly belonged to anyone.

She pinned the stencil to the bay wall and worked the outline with a stylus of hot wire, one unbroken stroke so the line never lifted. A cross on the brow. A bloom of petals at the crown. Scallops along the cheeks where the bones would sit. When she stepped back, the skull looked out from a single black thread with no shadow and no colour, and the lamp hummed over it like a slow pulse.

The commons filled gradually. Someone set a cup of water at the foot of the table, someone else a dish of salt. Ines laid the marigolds beside the skull, a little crooked, and for once did not apologise to anyone for it. 'Find the way,' she told the room, and the ring's lights dimmed one panel at a time, as if the dead had come in quietly and taken their seats.