Pencil line drawing of a sugar skull woman with roses, leaves and a candle lantern, a neo-traditional tattoo design.

Sugar skull woman with roses and lantern

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil linework design of a woman with a sugar skull face paint, long flowing hair and a string of beads. Roses and leaves frame the figure, and a lantern with a lit candle sits at the bottom of the composition. The drawing uses fine uniform outlines with no shading, and it is shown in monochrome on pale paper.

Neo-trad Botanical Sugar skull Woman Rose Lantern Candle Bead Leaves Hair

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 wind on the Hollow Saddle had teeth that October, and Marta still had three hours of climbing before the frost sealed the path. Her grandmother had taught her the old rule: the dead come down the pass on the last night of the month, and they walk past any house left dark. So she carried the iron lantern to the cairn, rubbed the soot from its panes with her sleeve and lit the stub of candle inside with a splinter from the hearth.

Keep reading

She had painted her face that afternoon, white as lime, with black ringed eyes and a grin drawn across her jaw, the way the women of the valley always did. The dead, her grandmother said, could not tell a living face from their own in the dusk, and would not stop to ask. Roses grew wild in the stone clefts below the cairn, late and rust-red. Marta pulled three and wound their stems through the beads of the rosary at her throat, then sat down with her back to the warm iron and waited.

The bell in the chapel below rang nine when the first of them came up the path. It was a tall man in a coat too heavy for the season, and he stopped at the lantern and looked at her for a long time. 'You are not Ilse,' he said. 'Ilse is in the valley with her door barred, and she will not open it for me.' Marta looked at the roses in her hand, then at the cold path behind him. 'Then take this to her,' she said, 'and tell her the light is still lit.' He took the flower, and the candle guttered as he passed, and by the time the next figure reached the slope the man had gone down into the mist.

By dawn the candle had burned to a bead of wax. Marta walked the pass to the valley road and found the frost unbroken except for a line of footprints going down the mountain, and a single one, very small, going back up. At the bottom, a door stood open in the grey light, and a rose lay on its step.