Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a woman with a sugar skull face, flowers and a pentagram on an upper arm, against a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull woman and pentagram on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face with a sugar skull style pattern of dotted and ornamental detail is framed by flowers, leaves and long flowing hair. An eye is shown on the forehead area, and a pentagram and small flourishes sit lower on the arm. The linework is bold and the shading is in black and grey, with the design wrapping around the upper arm against a plain white tank top and red brick wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mail boat put Ruth Calloway ashore on Skerrin with a tin of stencil card, three brushes and a letter that said only: finish what your mother started. The chapel wall faced the harbour, and somebody had been painting on it for thirty years. Nothing she found there looked like a saint. There was a woman with hair pouring down to the sea wall, flowers stacked over her brow like a crown, and a single open eye set in the middle of her forehead, watching the boats.

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The islanders called her Mairi-of-the-Eye and would not say who had made her. Ruth worked through the grey weeks, sealing the damp plaster with lime, tracing the dotted lace across the cheeks, and each morning the black ivy at the woman's throat had crept a little lower, as if the paint were drifting towards the water. Mr Thorburn at the shop said it was the tide's doing. The ferryman said nothing and kept his lines coiled.

On the last Sunday, she scraped back a flake of old render and found a pencilled name under the ochre: R. Calloway, 1961. Her mother had left this island at seventeen with ink on her wrists and never explained it. Ruth sat on the harbour step until the light went copper, then picked up the fine brush.

She drew the eye last, opening the lid with three careful strokes. When she stood back, every boat in the harbour had turned its bow the same way, towards the chapel. The tide came over the step and she let it. The mail boat would return on Tuesday. She had already decided she would not be on it.

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