Colour realism tattoo of a woman with sugar skull face make-up and flowing red hair, shown on a limb.

Sugar skull woman portrait on a limb

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A woman's face is shown with sugar skull make-up, including a dark blue skull nose, dark eye sockets with lashes, and a heart-shaped motif on the forehead. Her long red hair frames the face and fades into the skin at the edges. Soft shading and vivid red, pink, blue and orange ink give the portrait depth, and the design fills the frame with the face centred.

Realism Other Sugar skull Woman Portrait Heart Candy Red hair Spider web Star Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every November the boats came in from the mainland with sacks of icing sugar, and the women of Inchmora sat up in their kitchens painting their faces white for the dead. Old Ada Kerrigan never painted her own. She said the dead knew her face well enough and would find her without help. Her granddaughter Nell called it pride, across the table, with a cup of tea going cold between them.

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The paint was a family secret, kept with the recipe: egg white, sugar, a drop of blackcurrant for the eyes, a thread of gold for the swirls. One spring a deckhand from the steamer left a paper bag of peppermint hearts on the quay, red and white spiralled like barley sugar. Nell pressed one into the paint on her brow, and Ada said the dead did not care for sweetness that came from somewhere else. Nell laughed and kept the heart there anyway, and wore it up the cliff path to the chapel.

The chapel had no roof since the storm of 1911, but the wall still held the drowned men's names, scratched in with a nail. Nell found Ada's husband's name near the bottom, Tom Kerrigan, and beneath it a small star, drawn carefully in the same blue as the paint. She understood then that Ada had painted the dark sockets every year for him, and had never once been able to finish the face.

Nell walked back down in the dusk with the sugar drying tight on her cheeks. At the door Ada was waiting with a brush in her hand and a dish of blackcurrant, and without a word she began on Nell's left eye, slowly, as if there were all the time in the world.