Black and grey pencil flash drawing of a bomb with fins, a smoke cloud and a ribbon banner with lettering, in a traditional style.

Bomb with banner and smoke flash

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a bomb with tail fins rising from a smoke cloud, with a ribbon banner wrapped around its body. The banner carries lettering that appears to read BOMBS AWAY, and the outline is shaded with hatching and soft grey tones. The image is a monochrome design sheet with the subject centred on a plain background.

Traditional Smoke Banner Fin Lettering

Find an artist for this

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

Now sit yourselves down, the pair of you, and mind the gravy, because this is the one about Mrs Pargeter's bomb. You'll not have heard it. Nobody in Saltcombe talks about it now, and she'd have had my hide for telling it at the breakfast table, but she's been gone twelve years and the bomb rusted into the mud of the harbour long before that.

Keep reading

It came down the August after the fishing boats were requisitioned, nose-first into the slipway with its tail fins still stuck up in the air like a gull's feet. The smoke sat over the bay for three days. Everyone in this house tied wet tea towels over their mouths and argued about whether it would go off. Mrs Pargeter did not argue. She bought a pot of red paint from the chandler's, climbed the sea wall in her good coat, and tied a strip of old bunting round the thing, painting BOMBS AWAY across it in letters a foot high. Somebody ought to have the last word on it, she said, and it was going to be a lady.

The Royal Engineers came on the Thursday and laughed so hard one of them had to sit down on a bollard. They defused it with a tin of pilchards for the corporal and a great deal of patience. Mrs Pargeter kept the ribbon. She hung it in the hall above the coat pegs, and every lodger who ever complained about the damp got told to look up and be grateful it was only weather.

The paint's faded now. Look up there, past the barometer. The first word has gone to a brown smudge, so what's left is the one that matters most to a bomb, and she used to say it was the only thing she'd ever wanted from one.