Watercolour style tattoo on an upper arm showing a blue and yellow bird beside a lamp post, a moon and the words Next Stop Everywhere.

Bird, lamp post and moon on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blue and yellow bird with outstretched wings sits beside a black-outlined lamp post in front of a large moon with crater marks. The words NEXT STOP EVERYWHERE are written in black capitals below, with a loose blue and purple wash across the base. Black linework is combined with soft watercolour-like fills in blue, yellow and grey, and the design is shown on the outer upper arm against a dark top and a blurred brick background.

Upper arm Bird Moon Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frances had worked the cloakroom at the Majestic Ballroom in Hastings for eleven winters, and she knew the coats by their smell before she knew the faces under them. On the last Saturday in October the band packed up early, the rain came sideways off the front, and the only thing left on the pavement was the lamp post outside the side door, humming like a kettle.

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A blue bird had taken to roosting on the iron bracket above the lamp. Nobody had seen where it came from. Gerald, the doorman, swore it was the same bird that had sat on the bandstand the summer his wife left for Margate, and Frances let him say it because it was easier than arguing with a man who wept at the Strauss waltzes. She went out with a cup of tea and a ticket stub in her apron pocket, meaning to tell the bird it was past closing time.

The moon hung enormous over the rooftops, pocked and grey as a bad sixpence. The bird lifted its wings, bright yellow at the breast, and for a moment the whole lit street seemed to tip towards it. Frances thought of the cloakroom tickets she had torn in half for thirty years, each one a promise that someone would come back for their things.

She pinned the stub to the lamp post with a drawing pin and wrote on the back of it in pencil, the only words she could think of: next stop, everywhere. Then she went inside, switched off the lights, and left the tea going cold on the step. By morning the stub had gone, and so had the bird, and somewhere across the water a bus was calling its stops to an empty upper deck.