Flash design of a teal sugar skull with purple linework, dot details and red roses with thorny vines, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal sugar skull with red roses

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A stylised sugar skull with a teal and green face, purple linework, dotted markings and hollow eye sockets, framed below by red roses and green thorny vines. The bold outlines and smooth gradient shading give the skull a glossy, dimensional look. It sits against a dark green patterned background with a symmetrical, centred composition.

Neo-trad Traditional Skull Sugar skull Rose Vine Thorn Leaves Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By three in the morning the ward on Lindqvist Wing has gone quiet enough to hear the drip counter ticking in bay four. You are halfway through restocking the linen trolley when the buzzer goes above bed nine, and you find Mrs Abernathy sitting up in the blue glow of the monitor, holding a paper cup of tea she has not touched.

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She wants to know whether you have seen the sugar skulls the hospice volunteers put out last November. You have, on a leaflet, you tell her. She smiles and says her mother in Oaxaca set a plate of bread and a glass of mezcal on the table every autumn for the people who had gone before, and laughed at anyone who called the skulls morbid. "They're sweets, love," she says. "You eat a bit of the dead's sugar so they know you're not frightened of them."

You pull the curtain back so she can see the car park, where the sodium lamps have turned the rain to thread. She names the cars she knows, the bus shelter, a fox crossing by the bins. Her voice slows. You sit on the plastic stool and listen to the fox, the drip, the lift doors far away, until her cup stops steaming and her breathing settles into the long pauses that mean she is finally resting.

At six the day staff arrive with their bags and their coffee. In the handover book, under bed nine, you write that Mrs Abernathy asked for her mother's plate and that she ate a custard cream with her tea. Then you leave the packet open on the sill, one biscuit missing, for whoever sits up next.