Realism tattoo of a sugar skull woman with purple eye makeup and lips, seen through torn skin on the upper arm.

Sugar skull woman tearing through skin on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large portrait of a woman with sugar skull face paint, shown as if the skin of the arm is peeling back to reveal her face. Her hands hold the torn edges, and her eyes and lips are picked out in purple against black and grey shading. The smooth, detailed shading and the ripped-skin effect fill the upper arm from shoulder to elbow.

Realism Upper arm Sugar skull Woman Torn skin Hand Eye Lip Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint was still tacky when Celia sat down on the crate beside the marigold stall and told Marisol to start with the mouth. Marisol had painted thirty faces that October, but none had asked her to leave the lips for last, so she dipped her brush in violet and waited for the old woman to explain.

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Celia said her husband had died in the spring with his good shirt still hanging unwashed in the cupboard. Every year since, she had walked the cemetery road in skull paint, and every year he failed to recognise her. This time she wanted a face he could not mistake, one that looked out at him from under a torn layer of pale skin. 'Make it look like I am coming out,' she said. 'Like a woman who got tired of hiding.'

Marisol built the rest slowly: black shadow pooled under the cheekbones, the sugar-white nose, the two violet eyes ringed with lace. She curled the torn edges back at the temple and painted two hands holding them open. By dusk the face was finished, and Celia studied it in the cracked mirror of the stall, nodded once, and laughed at how serious she looked.

At the cemetery gate the procession broke into song. Celia stepped forward, took hold of the painted edges at her brow and pulled. The paint came away in one long pale sheet, like a letter drawn from an envelope, and underneath she was only herself, grey-haired and grinning. Marisol gathered the flakes from the gravel and scattered them among the marigolds, where they lay like scraps of paper someone had forgotten to post.