Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of two sugar skulls with red roses, green scrollwork and blue and pink flowers on a limb.

Sugar skulls and roses on a limb

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

Two sugar skulls are shown one above the other, the upper one in orange and brown and the lower one in turquoise, both decorated with pink, yellow and blue dotted patterns and flowers. Red roses and green scrolls frame the left side, with bold black outlines and smooth colour shading throughout. The tattoo fills the full height of a vertical photo against plain skin.

Neo-trad Other Sugar skull Skull Rose Flower Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, Mr Ashdown in room four has finally paid his arrears, though not in coins. He handed me a tin of sugar skulls the size of teacups, painted up like something from a fairground: one in orange and brown with dark shadows under the eyes, the other in a turquoise so bright it hurt to look at on the mantelpiece. He said they were for the dead. I said we had plenty of those on Clifton Road, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the bottom stair.

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He is a sign painter from Liverpool who has been to Mexico twice and talks about it the way other men talk about the football. Every October he sets out marigolds and paper cut-outs on the hall table, and this year he asked if he could hang the orange one in the front window so the sea air could get at its pink dots. I said the sea air would crack it. He said that was the point, that everything goes back to the sand in the end. I told him that was the most morbid thing I'd heard since the bingo caller's divorce.

The rain came sideways off the front on Tuesday and the orange skull sweated in its paper cup all afternoon. I thought he'd be cross, but he only fetched his brushes and touched up the roses that had run into the green scrolls, humming something with no tune to it.

This morning the turquoise one was gone from the sill. In its place was a single red rose, wired at the stem, and a note in capitals: FOR THE LADY WHO DOES THE STAIRS. I put the rose in a jam jar beside Stan's photograph, which is where it belongs, and I'm not ashamed to say I cried into the teapot.

Love, Maureen