Two drawn sugar skulls, one wearing a top hat and one with roses and a veil, above the words till and death, in a traditional flash design.

Twin sugar skulls with 'till death' lettering

Traditional · Colour · Flash

Two stylised sugar skulls sit side by side on a deep maroon background, one wearing a top hat with a purple band and the other framed by red and peach roses with a netted veil. The skulls are drawn with dotted outlines, soft brown shading and cream fills, and the words till and death are written in a dark script beneath them. The symmetrical layout and framed panels give it the look of a paired flash sheet.

Traditional Skull Sugar skull Top hat Rose Veil Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester had been painting sugar skulls for the Ashcombe fair since the winter her husband's hat blew into the millpond, and every November she still made two, one for the hat and one for the veil, because Wilf had insisted the pair should never be sold apart. She sat at the kitchen table with a jar of cochineal and a fine brush, her breath fogging the window where the forest began at the bottom of the lane.

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The bargain had been struck on a Sunday in the churchyard, when the vicar's boy asked why the old couple at number nine still walked to church arm in arm after fifty years. Wilf laughed and said the words were already on the stone, till death, and Hester said the stonemason spelled things however he liked. They argued about it all the way home through the beech wood, and somewhere between the stile and the gate they agreed the lettering should be in the same hand as the marriage register.

On the morning of the fair she carried the skulls down to the green in a basket lined with muslin. She set the top-hat skull on the trestle beside the bread, the veiled one across the lane where the wind could reach it, and tied a thread between them so they would not be parted in the crowd. By noon the veil had tugged loose and fluttered over the hedge into the trees, and a girl from the forest cottages came running with it held up like a flag.

Hester took it, tucked it back over the painted curls, and found Wilf's hat resting on the wall as if he had only stepped out. She did not go looking for him. She smoothed the lace and let the thread hang slack between the two skulls, which was how they had always meant to go.