Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a bicycle and a row of houses inside a bottle, with stars, a moon and the words ALTIJD VOORUIT, on the calf.

Bicycle and town in a bottle on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A glass bottle with a stippled dotwork interior frames a bicycle in the foreground and a street of tall, narrow houses behind it. Stars, a crescent moon and puffy clouds fill the upper part of the bottle, and the words ALTIJD VOORUIT are written in outlined capitals on either side of the neck. The work is in black ink and grey dot shading with bold outlines, and the composition is centred and vertical on the calf.

Dotwork Calf Bottle Bicycle House Star Moon Cloud Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bottle came out of a skip behind the Haarlem brewery, green glass with a lip chipped like a broken tooth. Mees Dekker carried it home under his coat through three days of rain, because he had promised his daughter a town she could walk into, and a bottle was the only door he could think of.

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He worked at the kitchen table with a magnifying lamp and a sewing needle heated red and bent into a stylus. Every house went in as a dot, thousands of them tapped against the inside of the glass, so the gables greyed as the light fell through. The houses were easy. He had walked past their kind for forty years. The bicycle took five weeks: spokes thinner than hair, a chain built link by link from the tip of a pin, a saddle no bigger than a fingernail. When it was finished he lettered the words his father had painted on the shed door, ALTIJD VOORUIT, on either side of the neck, the capitals ruled in pencil first and his hand shaking anyway.

Noor was nine and wanted the moon. He cut one from tinfoil and glued it beside the stars, seven of them, because seven was what she had counted from her bed the night she could not sleep. She held the bottle up to the lamp and turned it slowly. "The bicycle isn't going anywhere," she said. "It's stuck to the bottom." "Yes." "Then it isn't forward." He thought about that for a long time. Then he said, "It's waiting for you to be well enough to ride it," and she frowned, and the frown was what he had wanted.

He corked the bottle that night. In the morning the sun came through the green glass and threw a bicycle the size of a hand across the windowsill, its wheels turning on nothing, the whole town trembling gently in its light. Noor pressed her palm to the warm glass and did not ask him to explain.