Two sugar skull designs on a grey background, one with a cross and blue rose-like eyes, the other with a red rose on its crown and purple flower eyes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two colourful sugar skull designs

Colour · Flash

Two stylised sugar skulls sit side by side on a grey background. The left skull has a small cross on its forehead, scroll-like floral motifs, and round blue and orange patterned eye sockets, while the right skull has a large red rose on its crown and purple flower-shaped eyes. Both use bold outlines, decorative patterning and bright multicolour fills against a mostly neutral backdrop.

Sugar skull Skull Rose Flower Cross Floral Day of the dead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Lupe, the cross on the left skull came out crooked again, so I have been sitting on the back step of the workshop since eleven, painting over it with a brush no thicker than an eyelash. The street lamp outside buzzes like there is a wasp trapped in it. Tomorrow the whole row goes out on the trestle tables by the fountain, and nobody will look at my cross except me, which is why I cannot let it go.

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Mateo says the rose on the right one should be bigger, that people buy roses for their dead and not for themselves, though I think he only says it because he wants the bigger pot of pink. The sugar has set hard enough to lift now. I brushed the orange scrolls on the cheeks with the last of the saffron paint, and the blue rings around the eyes went on so wet they ran for a moment before they settled. Señora Ocampo swept past with her bread basket and told me to stop fussing and eat something.

Just before midnight a boy came round the corner carrying a tin of cocoa in each hand and asked whether we had one with purple eyes, because his grandfather had always liked purple. I had only the one. I wrapped it in newspaper and he paid me in coins from a jam jar, counting them out on the step like a banker. He did not take it away. He asked me to finish the last eye, so I did, and he sat beside me while the paint dried, both of us waiting in the orange light. I have left the other socket empty on purpose, so you can see where I stopped. Come on Sunday and tell me I am wrong about the cross.