Colour tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder showing a sugar skull woman with a cigarette beside red roses and a skull, with black ink splashes.

Sugar skull woman and roses on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman in profile with a decorated sugar skull face, exhaling smoke from a cigarette, with dark hair flowing into leaves and vines. Large red roses sit on the shoulder, and a smaller grey skull with red roses appears lower on the arm. The linework is bold with painterly, blended shading, and black ink splashes frame the composition.

Neo-trad Realism Upper arm Shoulder Sugar skull Woman Rose Skull Cigarette Vine Leaves Ink splash Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the hedge by seven, so I took the secateurs to the roses first, because roses in January are honest work: you cut back to an outward bud and you don't think about it. Dad's walled garden at Hollin Farm had gone to brambles since he died, and the only thing left in shape was the long bed under the south wall, where he'd planted the red ones the year I was born.

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Aunt Teresa came up from Leeds on the bus that Sunday with a cardboard box and a cigarette she didn't light, which was how I knew she meant to stay a while. Inside the box, wrapped in the Yorkshire Post, was a sugar skull the size of a teacup, its brow painted with orange scrolls and its cheeks blown with white flowers. 'Your mother made these every November,' she said. 'Forty years she kept the dead fed with sugar and marigolds, and nobody on this side of the Pennines ever asked her why.'

I put the skull on the potting bench between the twine and the bone meal. We didn't talk much that afternoon. We cut back the Albertine and the old Crimson Glory, and she tied the long canes to the wires while I swept up the leaves that had gone black in the cold. Every few minutes she looked over at the skull, the way you'd look at someone asleep in the next room.

When the light went we carried it out to the bed and set it in the bare soil at the foot of the wall, a pinch of sugar in its open jaw, and I cut the last rose, a single bloom no bigger than a fist, and laid it across its brow. Teresa lit her cigarette then, finally, and the smoke hung over the frost like a ribbon nobody was going to untie. 'There,' she said. 'Now the garden knows where she is.'