Colour cartoon tattoo of a bird driving a supercharged dragster with blue flames, in a traditional style on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon bird in a dragster on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon bird with a long yellow beak and red tongue sits in a supercharged dragster with large rear wheels. Blue flames stream behind the car against a green hillside. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat areas of colour and some shading on the body and wheels.

Traditional Calf Bird Flame Cartoon Hill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Cold Ashby believed the bird could drive, least of all Mr Pargeter at the garage, who had sold her a supercharger off a broken lorry for two shillings and a promise to bring the bolts back. She came up the lane every Thursday with her red tongue out and her long yellow beak tapping the petrol cap, and asked for the blower tuned to a whine she could hear from the top of Gallow Hill.

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The meet was on the Sunday, a strip of cut meadow below the hill. Forty-odd machines sat on the grass, all chrome and bad temper. Dobbs in his green Ford had the nerve to laugh when she wheeled out, a squat rusted thing with back wheels as fat as church bells and a blue flame pipe licking out behind like a ribbon. She didn't answer him. She tucked her head low under the little windscreen and let the engine take a breath.

The flag dropped. Dobbs got a clean start and was half a field ahead before her exhaust had finished its roar. Then the flames came loose, streaming back over the hedge and bending the grass flat, and the dragster simply rolled past him as if he had stopped to pick mushrooms. Mr Pargeter swore she lifted a full yard off the ground at the line, and he was not a man who exaggerated about engines.

She collected her prize, a tin cup with the handle missing, and rode home downhill with the wind in her feathers. Dobbs asked her afterwards what she'd put under the bonnet. She told him the same thing she told the postmaster: a good temper and a lot of hill. The blue flames were still lit on the slope at dusk, and the sheep wouldn't graze that meadow for a week.