Pencil sketch of two ornate sugar skulls with flowers and curling swirls, drawn as a tattoo design in black and grey.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skulls with flowers and swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of two sugar skulls, one above the other, each decorated with patterned details on the forehead and cheeks and set beside a flower. Curling scroll lines and faint radiating rays fill the background. The linework is dark and detailed, with soft grey shading on the skulls and no colour.

Skull Sugar skull Flower Swirl Scroll

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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 programme still smelled of the school hall, that particular mix of floor polish and cold radiator, and I was holding it like a ticket I'd forgotten I'd bought. Maureen Pryce was at the trestle table by the door, same tight perm, same clipboard. She ticked my name without looking up and said, "You're the one who drew on the Year Eleven skulls in biro." I said I'd drawn on plenty of things. She said that was the trouble with me.

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The room had been done up with paper flowers in orange and purple, the kind the drama club cut out every Easter, and someone had strung black crepe along the windows. Dev Kaur was by the urn, telling anyone who'd listen that she still had the sketchbook. She didn't, of course. Her mum had it, in a loft in Walsall, and I knew because I'd seen it there the summer we were sixteen, the two of us lying on the boards with the fan going round. Pages of skulls with curls for eyes and rays spilling off the edges like a sunrise somebody had argued with.

I found the old drawing on my phone at the bus stop before the reunion, a photo of a photo of my pencil work, grey and smudged, two skulls stacked one over the other with scroll lines wrapped round them. Dev saw it over my shoulder and laughed so hard she had to put her cup down. "You kept that? Thirty years?" I told her I hadn't kept it; I'd just never got around to throwing it out.

We stood by the window while the DJ fumbled with a cable. Outside, the car park lights came on one by one, and for a minute the crepe threw long shadows across us like the rays we used to draw. Dev tapped my wrist. "Right. Same as before. You do the scrolls, I'll do the petals." She handed me a biro from her bag, and I took it.