Greyscale pencil drawing of a woman with sugar skull face paint and a large flower in her hair, drawn as a realistic portrait tattoo design.

Sugar skull woman portrait with flower

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed graphite drawing of a woman's face and neck, with sugar skull face paint covering one side, ornate scrollwork around the eye, and a heart motif on the neck. A large daisy-like flower sits in her swept-back hair, which falls across her shoulder and partly covers the other side of her face. Soft shading and fine hatching give the portrait a realistic, three-dimensional finish against a pale background.

Realism Woman Sugar skull Flower Portrait Heart Hair Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sugar was always too damp in August, so Nan Ysolde moved the boiling to the stone kitchen at the top of the lane, where the sea wind could not reach the pans. I was eleven that year and allowed only to stir. Every skull for the dead of Kestle Holm had to be pressed by hand and finished before the ferry came in on the first of November, because the mainland cousins always wanted to see them laid out along the harbour wall.

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Nan painted the scrollwork herself. She would not let anyone else touch the eyes. She said a face painted by someone who had not known the dead was only a mask, and a mask would not tell the dead where to go. Her brush was a single hair from a grey cat that had died the winter before, bound to a sliver of goose quill with thread. She dipped it in cochineal, then in the cold tea she kept for the purpose, and drew the curls around each socket as if she were writing a name she meant to keep.

The year the boats did not come back from the north, she painted a daisy for Mrs Pellow's husband, the way he used to wear one behind his ear on Sundays. Mrs Pellow came to the wall with her hair pinned back and stood looking at it for a long time. Then she took a single white flower from her coat, tucked it into her own hair, and said nothing. Nobody needed her to.

On the morning of the second, the tide was out and the wall was lined with faces. Nan walked the length of it with her hands in her apron. At the end she stopped before the last skull, which had no flower on it, and looked out past the breakwater where the mist was thinning. 'Now he'll know the way home,' she said, and went back up the lane to put the kettle on.