Black script lettering quote and a colour sugar skull tattoo with red roses on a bare thigh.

Text quote and sugar skull on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a thigh carrying black script lettering that reads in part 'She is clothed with strength and dignity' and 'laughs without fear of the future', with a small ornate motif above the text. A colour sugar skull decorated with red flowers sits lower on the leg, with a faint second outline beside it. The lettering is solid black and the skull uses red, grey and black ink, set against pale skin and a light background.

Lettering Traditional Thigh Script Quote Sugar skull Skull Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas,

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The bus from Oaxaca took eleven hours to climb the pass above Ixtlán, and somewhere past the last cactus stand the driver stopped to let a goat herd cross. I thought of you, because you would have got out and helped him. Mamá's sugar skulls arrived on Thursday, wrapped in newspaper from the Tuesday before she died. Two were cracked. The red paper roses on the one with the crown had bled into the icing, so it looks as if it has been crying.

I found the recipe card in her Bible, tucked under the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs, where she had underlined the part about the woman who laughs without fear of the future. Beside it she had written in pencil: this is for the girls, not for the men. You will say that is unfair. I said it too, at the kitchen table, when she made me count the sugar twice.

I am building the altar on the twenty-ninth, the way she did, with the marigolds, the bread with the sugar on top, and the photograph of her in the blue dress. I have put the cracked skull at the front, where the candle will catch the red. Come if you can. The pass is steep, but the view from the top is worth the lungs.

Love, Ximena