Black and grey sugar skull woman tattoo with teal hair accents and ornate swirling linework across the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull woman with flowing hair on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A woman with sugar skull face makeup and a horn-like shape on her forehead is drawn in fine black linework, surrounded by flowing hair and decorative swirls. Teal ink runs through sections of the hair, while the face and ornaments are shaded in grey with small dotted speckles. The design wraps around the outer thigh and fills the frame, with the rest of the body and a dark top visible at the edges.

Dotwork Thigh Sugar skull Woman Swirl Floral ornament Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The frost has held the top field for nine days now and the ewes have stopped bothering with the hay trough, so I have had time to think about the woman from the lane. She came up on the Tuesday before the snow, walking with no coat, her face painted white and black around the eyes like the saints in the Sunday book, and a horn of bone set above her brow that caught the light whenever she turned. Her hair ran past her hips in strands of a blue-green I can only call pond ice, and she asked after the grey mare that Dad sold to the Hallams in March.

I told her the mare was gone. She said she knew that, and had come to see the gate. We walked down together to the old hurdle by the spinney, and she put her palm flat on the wood and left a print of frost that did not melt, not even when the sun came round.

She said the horn was for finding the way back through a hard season, and that anyone who wanted to go out past the spinney in winter had to pay the road in something they would not miss. Mum laughed at that until she saw the hair. Dad did not laugh at all. He went out the next morning with the tin of sheep dip and the bag of barley seed we keep for spring, and came back with his coat buttoned wrong and nothing to say.

The mare came home last night, standing at the gate with her breath smoking and her tail full of blue-green burrs. Dad has not asked me to unbolt the stable, and I have not asked him why.

Love, Annie