Realistic forearm tattoo of a sugar skull woman with red eyes, smoke swirls and a skull below, shaded in grey with red accents.

Sugar skull woman and skull on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait of a woman with sugar skull face paint and filigree detail on one cheek, with a skull beneath her and wisps of smoke curling around the design. The shading is smooth and detailed, mostly in grey and black with soft highlights. Red ink on the eyes adds the only strong colour, and the design fills the length of the forearm.

Realism Forearm Sugar skull Woman Skull Smoke Filigree Portrait

Find an artist for this

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 hall smelled of floor polish and warm squash, and Dawn Pritchard had pinned a photograph of Year Eleven to the end of the trestle table so everyone could point at their younger faces and groan. I found Teresa Gale in the back row, chin up, a blue plastic clip in her hair. She had turned up to school on the last day of October with her face painted white and black like the skulls in her grandmother's prayer book, and nobody had dared tell her it was too much.

Keep reading

She's not coming, Dawn said, handing me a paper cup. Her mum says she went back to Monterrey years ago. Shame. She was the funniest girl in that class. I laughed the way you do at reunions, then noticed a corner of card poking out from behind the photograph. On the back, in biro gone soft with age, someone had written: Find me where the marigolds are, first day of November. Don't bring anyone scared of the dark.

I went up the hill the next morning with a bunch of orange flowers from the market and no real idea what I was looking for. The cemetery was loud with families sweeping paths and setting out bread shaped like bones. Near the chapel wall, a grave I had never noticed was dusted with petals, and a small tin of paints sat open beside a jam jar of water. Someone had drawn a curling line across the stone in white chalk, rising like smoke toward the sky.

I crouched and dipped one finger in the water. In the wet marble, the reflection of the clouds shifted, and a woman with her hair piled high looked back at me, grinning, a smear of red beneath each eye. She lifted a hand as if to say, you're late. I didn't wipe the paint away. I left the flowers beside the jar, stayed until the bells rang noon, and said her name out loud for the first time in twenty-six years.