Colour neo-trad tattoo of two sugar skulls, roses and a sunflower covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Sugar skulls and roses on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two sugar skulls are stacked diagonally across the upper arm and shoulder, with red roses on either side and a purple and yellow sunflower between the skulls. The skulls are shaded in grey with painted-style detail on the teeth and decorative dots, and bold black outlines frame the design. Colour ink dominates, with red, blue, teal, purple and yellow used across the flowers and skull decoration, and dark scrollwork fills the spaces around the composition.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Skull Sugar skull Rose Sunflower Scrollwork Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint had to be ground before the bells rang for the Lantern Days, and Ilse Varrow was already two hours behind. Forty sugar skulls sat in rows on the cold trestle in her workshop at Glassmere, each waiting for its teeth to be picked out in blue and its eye rings dotted in teal, red and cream. Her apprentice Pell had done the scrollwork on most of them, but the largest at the end, the one with the grey-washed brow, was still bare.

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The king's rider came up the causeway at noon with mud to his knees and a sealed letter. The queen had been dead a year. The king wanted her skull painted with red roses on both cheeks and a sunflower laid between brow and jaw, because she had turned her face to the sun every morning of her life, and he could not bear to think of her facing the dark. Ilse read the letter twice, then asked Pell what the queen had grown in her garden. Pell said roses, red as crust on a loaf, and sunflowers that followed the sun along the south wall.

So Ilse worked through the night. She gave the skull roses that were nearly too red to look at, and she gave the sunflower petals of violet and a centre of yellow, the colour of wheat before harvest. When she was done she set it on the sill with the others, and the rider took it away in a box lined with straw.

On Lantern Night the king carried the skull down to the river himself and let it drift out past the mill wheel. Pell watched from the bank and saw the lamplight catch the teal dots. Before dawn, when the water was still grey and no sun had yet cleared the hills, Pell saw the painted flower lift its head and turn, slowly, to face the east.