Black and grey sugar skull woman tattoo with a purple rose in her hair on a limb, with a partly visible blue skull tattoo beside it.

Sugar skull woman with purple rose

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A sugar skull woman portrait fills the frame, with a dark, voluminous hairstyle and a purple rose tucked above one side of the head. The face is shaded in soft greys with fine dotted detailing in yellow on the mask, and scrolling swirls sit below. A partly visible skull tattoo in blue-grey tones sits to the left, and the photo is taken close up on a plaid surface.

Neo-trad Other Sugar skull Woman Rose Skull Swirl Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The generator coughs itself awake at six, and you're already on the booth step with tea gone cold, watching the lads haul the canvas banner off the lorry. Mags painted it the spring the Pattinson show first came north, and she always said the woman on it was the only honest thing on the whole fair. Her mask is a sugar skull, sweet and cracked at the jaw, and the rose above her ear is purple because that was the only tin Mags could afford.

Keep reading

The wind took one corner of the banner last night, so you spent an hour in the mud with a torch in your teeth, pegging it back. That's when you saw the rose. The petals had been gone over with a finer brush, the shadows deepened, a sliver of lilac laid into the curl at the centre. Nobody has a brush near that banner but you, and you haven't touched it since March, when they buried Mags in Skegness with her paint roller still in the van.

You ask Tully on the waltzer, and he shrugs with a mouthful of bacon roll and says the Ruffles girl came by with a lantern and a bag of old rags, wanted to see the painted lady before the crowds. You don't argue. You go back to the booth and open the tin, and the lid comes away stiff and cold, like it's been waiting.

By noon the first punters are shuffling past the stall, and you are kneeling on the sawdust with Mags's smallest brush, laying one more lilac petal beneath the others. The paint is still tacky when the woman on the banner turns her yellow-dotted face towards the queue, and a child points and says the rose has grown.