Twenty sugar skull tattoo designs

The ferry office printer gave up on Tuesday, so I have been cutting the skull stencils by hand again, the way Abuela Lucía taught me on the roof of the water tower. Twenty of them, five rows of four, all on one bleached sheet that has survived two floods and a hurricane season in a biscuit tin. You asked which one I like best. I have decided it is the one with the spider's web drawn across the brow, because it looks as if it was caught in something and decided to stay.

Each one wears a different face. There is a flower in the left eye, a crown pressed onto the skull like a lid, a cross on the nose, a row of hearts that fall down the cheek like tears that have learned manners. The crowned one is the stencil everyone steals. Lucía said the dots were for counting the people who had gone up the river that year, and the stars were for the ones who came back, but she laughed when she said it, so I never knew if that was the truth or the kind of story grandmothers tell.

Yesterday the tin was open on the bench and the lamp kept flickering, and I stopped at the bottom right skull, the plain one with its eyes made of two solid holes. Nothing decorates it. I spent an hour trying to add a flower, then a star, then a line of dots, and rubbed each one out with my thumb. In the end I left it blank and cut a small window in the paper beside it, so the light could come through.

Keep it. Come home before the autumn tides.

Love, Inés