Black ink drawing of two sugar skulls facing each other with pompadour hairstyles and a small heart between them, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two sugar skulls with pompadour hair and a heart

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

Two sugar skull designs face each other, one with a diamond-filled ornamental cheek and the other with clover motifs in its eye sockets, each topped with a pompadour hairstyle. A small outlined heart sits between them. The design is drawn in black pen with fine linework and hatched shading on the hair and skulls, and a black pen lies across the bottom of the sheet.

Neo-trad Skull Sugar skull Heart Hair Diamond Clover

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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

Sit down by the runner beans, because this is the part where your grandfather always lied. Across the wall from the Pell house lived a skull called Mabel Quirk, who wore her hair up in a pompadour so tall it needed two hatpins and a prayer. Her cheek was a rosette of diamonds, cut so true that the sparrows stopped to look at her.

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Next door, behind the gooseberries, lived Ray Ocampo, who barbered for the whole parish and kept clovers in his eye sockets for luck. Every morning he swept his step, and every morning he watched Mabel water her marigolds. He never once said a word to her. He drew a heart in chalk on the wall instead, and the rain took it away by teatime.

One August the wall came down in a storm. Mabel and Ray stood either side of the rubble with their hair still perfect, and neither would be the first to speak. So the bees did it for them. They swarmed the gap the way bees do when they have decided something, and by morning a little heart of wax had set hard in the broken brick.

The wall was never rebuilt. Ray swears the clovers were a gift, and Mabel swears the diamonds were, and between them they grew a hedge of honeysuckle that nobody could bring themselves to cut. Pass me the secateurs, love. Mind the wasps. They have opinions about heart-shaped things.