Solid black cartoon bomb tattoo with an angry face, star-shaped fuse spark and radiating dashes on the forearm.

Cartoon bomb on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black cartoon bomb with angry eyebrows and a small smile sits at the centre of the design, topped by a star-shaped spark on its fuse. Short black dashes radiate outward around the bomb like rays of light. The ink is a single dense black with no shading, photographed against a grey top and a pale wall.

Forearm Star Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Mary Quill would touch the thing after the Tuesday it came up in the trawl, and I'll tell you why, boy, though you'll keep your hands on that net while I do. It was a black iron ball the size of a cabbage, with a stubby fuse on top and a spark on the end of it shaped like a star, and it had a face. Two eyebrows drawn down hard as a bailiff's, and a little mouth turned up at one corner like it knew something you didn't.

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Skipper Tom Abbot wanted it over the side. Cook wanted it in a bucket. Young Ruddock, who was daft as a brush, wanted to light it to see what it would do. So we set it on the wheelhouse ledge to think about it, and the thing sat there glaring at us, and every time the swell lifted the boat it gave a little fizz of those dashes round its middle, like it was clearing its throat.

Three days we fished with that glare on our backs. Nets came up light, the gulls went quiet, and the crew took to muttering. On the fourth morning Ruddock swore it had shifted an inch nearer the stove. Abbot took a boathook to it, and it rolled off the ledge, bounced once on the deck, and stopped dead, fuse up, looking at him. He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the hatch.

We never did find out what it was. Some say a sailor's leftover from the war, some say a gift from a bored god. What I know is that after that the catch came in, Abbot stopped cursing the weather, and that bomb still sits on the ledge of the wheelhouse, glaring at every man who comes aboard to make sure he's earned his keep. Now pass me that twine.