Traditional-style flash sheet of cartoon characters, a dagger wrapped in a rainbow snake, flowers, a heart and a lemon, drawn in bold outlines and bright colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon character flash sheet with dagger and snake

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A flash sheet of about a dozen separate cartoon designs on a star-speckled background, including a handheld console, a flame figure, a heart face, a lemon with glasses, a snail and a dog. The centrepiece is a dagger entwined with a rainbow snake and framed by pink flowers and leaves. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills in yellow, green, pink and blue give the sheet a bright, graphic finish.

Traditional Cartoon Dagger Snake Rainbow Flower Heart Dog Ice cream Star Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The van died twenty miles short of Ruby Wells, and by the time the sun cleared the ridge the lemons in the footwell had begun to sweat through their paper bags. I pushed the thing along the shoulder with my hip against the back door, the cones rattling in their tub, while the little grey console Ruthie had wired under the dashboard chirped its four-note tune every time the wheels caught a stone.

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Half a mile on, a dagger stood in the verge, point down, neat as a fence post. A rainbow snake had coiled round its grip, its tail lost somewhere in the dust, and pink flowers had sprouted up around the hilt as if the desert had been waiting for someone to bother. Taped to the crossguard was a card in Ruthie's loopy capitals: TAKE ONE, SHE SAID. THE BLADE IS ONLY FOR SHOWING.

I sat on the bumper in the blade's thin shade and ate a lemon ice lolly while the console chirped at my elbow. A snail came out of the dust, slow as a bank clerk, and set off up the back wheel. I let it. Nobody out here was in a hurry except me, and I had stopped being in a hurry somewhere around the second lolly.

When the van finally coughed back to life, I left the dagger where it was, still pointing at the sun, and drove on with the cones rattling behind me. In the mirror the snake looked like a dropped ribbon, and the snail was nowhere, having quietly taken the lift I had not offered it.