A woman lying on a bed in white lace underwear shows a colourful traditional-style sugar skull and rose tattoo on her upper arm, with a bird and red floral tattoos on her thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional sleeve with sugar skull and roses

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The image shows a woman lying on a light bed in white lace underwear, with the frame cropped below the shoulders and above the knees. Bold outlines and solid fills of red, blue, green, yellow and purple form a sugar skull, roses and a bird across the upper arm, with a large red floral design on the hip and thigh. The soft, cool-toned lighting and diagonal pose keep the colourful tattoos as the main focus.

Traditional Upper arm Thigh Sugar skull Rose Bird Flower Sleeve

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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

Shake that rain off your hat and come under the awning, because the tin roofs over the Sunday market have been drumming since dawn and the old woman at the flower stall has promised to tell it again. Ask her about the skull with the blue jaw. She will say it was painted by Tomás Ferreira, a sign-writer who could never afford good paint but could always afford marigolds.

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Tomás painted skulls for the dead in November, grinning things with sugar-paper teeth, but that autumn his sister Inés asked him for something for the living. She wanted roses, red as the ribbon in a fishmonger's daughter's hair, and a bird with green wings to carry them. He traded a jar of his mother's honey for a tin of cobalt and a sheet of yellow card, then worked by the lamp of the eel shop until his fingers smelled of turpentine and oranges.

Every night he painted the bird, and every morning the card was blank where it had been, and the bird was sitting on the rafters above the fish stalls, cocking its head at the gulls. Tomás gave up and let it fly. When Inés married the fishmonger, the bird went with her, and the roses bloomed again on her arm each time the rains came in off the harbour. So when the sky goes grey like this, listen for wings, and mind your sleeves, because that bird still likes to lift off and see the market.