Illustrated design of a woman with a sugar skull face, a feather headdress, roses, butterflies and a skull, drawn in a mixed black, grey and colour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull woman with feather headdress

Mixed · Flash

A drawn portrait of a woman whose face is half painted as a sugar skull, wearing a headdress of blue, orange and gold feathers. Roses, a large skull, monarch butterflies, a small bird and loose swirling linework surround her. The figure is shaded in black and grey with bright orange, red, yellow and blue accents against a warm, textured background.

Woman Sugar skull Butterfly Rose Skull Bird Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monarchs came down the cut in the second week of October, so thick that Tomasz had to cut the engine and wait by Hatton Locks for them to pass. They lifted off the towpath like a wet cloth being shaken out, orange and black, and settled again on the chimney, the coal bunker, the rope coiled on the gunwale. Behind him, Marisol knelt on the cabin roof with a fine brush and a jar of water, finishing the last rose.

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She had been painting since Braunston, a woman's face split down the middle, one half living and one half bone, sugar-white with black sockets, and above it a crown of feathers she kept redoing because the blue never sat right against the gold. Tomasz was not allowed to look. He was allowed to steer, and to carry the tin of skulls his aunt had moulded in Leeds, wrapped in the Yorkshire Post, to be left at every lock where someone had died that year.

At the bottom lock, Mrs Okafor was waiting with her gate key and her hands pushed into her coat. Her husband had gone in March. Tomasz set a skull on the balance beam and she set a marigold beside it, and neither of them said anything about the butterflies, which were drifting down over the water in twos and threes, as if someone had given them directions.

When they moved off, a single monarch rode on the cabin roof for two miles, its wings folding and opening over the wet paint. Marisol lifted her brush, looked at it, and laughed. The rose had dried the same colour as the wing, and nobody could have said any longer which of them had been copying the other.