Sugar Skull Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a sugar skull tattoo means

A sugar skull is not a picture of death in general. It stands for one person. In late October families buy or make them, pipe a name across the forehead in icing and set them on the ofrenda, the home altar, beside that person's photograph, their favourite food and drink, candles and heaps of orange marigolds, for the dead are welcomed back on 1 and 2 November. Friends also give them to the living, iced with the recipient's own name.

That makes the tattoo closer to a memorial than to a skull. The face is decorated rather than frightening because the visit is a happy one: the dead come as guests, and the altar is laid for a reunion rather than a funeral. A calavera with a name, a date or someone's favourite flower keeps to the custom. Worn as a Halloween mask, it has left it behind.

Almost every piece of the decoration comes off the altar. Marigolds, cempasúchil in Mexico, are said to guide the dead home, which is why they crown the wreathed skull on this page and bloom in the sockets of the sketched one. The candle on another skull's crown is the vigil kept at the graveside through the night. The monarch butterfly carries a belief from Michoacán, where the monarchs reach their winter forests at the start of November and many people take them for returning souls. A rosary and cross show the Catholic half of the feast.

La Catrina adds a sharper joke. She is a skeleton dressed as a society lady, and her point is that money and European fashion end in the same bones as everyone else's. The painted woman's face under a wide hat of roses, as in the Catrina here, borrows her clothes, and that face paint is far younger than the sugar skull, spread by parades and costume parties in recent decades.

Where the design comes from

Remembering the dead at the start of November joins two calendars: the Mexica feasts of the dead, over which Mictecacihuatl, queen of the underworld, was said to preside, and the Catholic days of All Saints and All Souls. UNESCO added the observance that grew from both to its intangible heritage list in 2008. The skulls are alfeñique, sugar paste pressed into clay moulds and iced, a craft Toluca celebrates with a fair each year. The printmaker José Guadalupe Posada drew the dead as drinking, dancing skeletons for cheap broadsheets, and before his death in 1913 etched a fashionable skeleton lady to mock Mexicans who dressed as Europeans. Diego Rivera named her La Catrina in his 1947 mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central. The Mexico City parade dates only from 2016, after the Bond film Spectre invented one.

Choosing yours

• Decide who it is for first. On the ofrenda the name goes across the forehead, so lettering there reads correctly to anyone who knows the custom, while a name on a banner beneath turns the piece into a Western memorial.
• Then decide how much of the face is painted. The split skull here leaves half as plain shaded bone, the anatomical skull and the calavera in one face, and the blackwork one cuts its flowers out of solid black. On colour pieces the white of the face is usually bare skin, since white ink yellows.
• Keep the mirror honest. On a frontal calavera, sockets that fail to match read as a mistake from across a room; the three-quarter skull with a rose tucked behind the jaw sidesteps the problem.

Common questions