Black and grey sugar skull tattoos with floral and lattice detail on the middle and ring fingers of a hand, worn alongside silver rings.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skulls on two fingers

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two sugar skull designs sit side by side on the top of the middle and ring fingers. Each skull has outlined eyes, a nose and a jaw, with small flowers and a lattice pattern filling the cheeks and forehead. The shading is soft grey inside black linework, and the plain background of the photograph keeps the focus on the fingers.

Hand Skull Sugar skull Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sugar was never right in damp weather, and Maud knew it, so she worked the paste in the bread oven's warm mouth where the wood smoke couldn't reach it. Her daughters stood either side of her with lard on their fingers, waiting to be told they could have the first crumb. Ada was nine and wanted to be quick. Wren was seven and wanted to be sure.

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Every autumn the village made skulls for the dead who had gone into the trees and not come out. Nobody said so plainly, but everybody left them on the stile at the wood's edge with a pinch of salt, and in the morning the skulls were gone and something else lay in their place: a stick, a bootlace, once a child's tooth wrapped in red wool. Maud's mother had cut the cheek lattice with a hairpin, and her mother before that, so the walkers would have something to count on the way through.

Ada pressed her mould too hard and the jaw cracked. She wept over it until Wren pinched a sprig of thyme from the sill and pressed the flowers in one at a time, five petals each, the way Maud had shown them. "That one's for you," Wren said. "The cracked one's for the wood. It won't mind."

At first light the stile was bare, as it should be, and across the gate someone had strung a web so fine and even that the dew hung on every thread like beads. Ada's cracked skull had been caught in the middle of it, and neither girl reached for it.