Traditional style tattoo of a blue canister with flying teeth and a red blood splatter on an upper arm, with other dark tattoos above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Canister, teeth and blood splatter on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blue and grey canister or tin is shown tipping on its side, with several white teeth flying out and a red blood splatter at the lower left. The bold black outlines and flat fills are typical of traditional tattooing, and the wood-grain style background is shaded in soft tones. Colour is limited to blue, red and white with skin tones, and dark tattoos are visible at the top of the frame.

Traditional Upper arm Teeth Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the tin. No, leave it where it lies. It's been lying there since the Tuesday my uncle Sol lost his temper with the dentist's cart. See the lid, bent like a bad elbow? That's the wind off the Cuttle Flats, and the wind is the only thing out here that's ever been honest with a tin.

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Sol drove a yellow van with a wooden wheel bolted to the roof for luck, and in the back he kept a tin of teeth. Not sweets, teeth. Every molar some farmer's wife had handed over in a kitchen at midnight, every eye tooth a drover had spat into a rag. He reckoned the tin was a ledger. Each tooth owed him a mile.

Then one afternoon on the Hollow Road, a pothole the size of a bathtub took the back wheel. The lid popped, and the tin rolled out over the boards like a drunk man leaving a wedding. Sol ran after it shouting, his palm bleeding where he'd caught the rim. Out the teeth went, pattering across the dust like hail on a corrugated roof, clicking into the cracks of the road.

Here's the part they never tell you. Sol sat in the sun for an hour gathering every one he could find, and when he counted them at the end, there were three more than he'd ever taken in. Three teeth nobody had given him. He never learned whose. He drove to the coast with the tin on the seat beside him, and at the edge of the sea he tipped it out and let the tide have them. Said he'd rather owe the water than the road.