Colour traditional-style tattoo of a cartoon man with a moustache inside a large bow made of checkered and cross flag designs, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon character in a flag bow

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A cartoon man with a moustache and a dark hat or hairstyle sits at the centre of a large bow. The bow's loops and tails are filled with a checkered yellow and dark blue pattern and red and white cross designs, all outlined in bold black. The shading is flat with smooth colour fills, and the tattoo sits on a close crop of pale skin.

Traditional Other Cartoon character Moustache Bow Flag Cross Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gentleman over the door of Pell's Ribbon House had lost his bow in Tuesday's gale, and by Thursday the whole board was flapping like a wet flag. I was up the ladder at eleven with a tin of black enamel and a borrowed lamp, because Mr Ambrose Pell wanted the ribbons back before the Friday market and would not hear of waiting for daylight.

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The bow was the trouble. Each loop had to be laid in the old pattern, the chequered gold and dark blue of the state's own arms, every diamond squared off with a rule. Pell's grandfather had sold ribbon from that window since before the war, and Pell carried a sample square in his waistcoat pocket and checked my corners against it twice. The red cross ran through each tail. I had learned the trick of it from Pell's wife: start in the middle and let the arms run out to the edges, never the other way.

Near two in the morning a cab pulled up below and a woman in a green coat stood looking up at me. She did not call out. She watched me set the last gold square into the left loop, nodded as if I had passed some examination, and walked off towards the harbour without a word. I thought nothing of it until Friday, when Pell opened the ledger for me. Forty years of orders for that bow, and on the last page, in his wife's careful hand, a name I knew. It was my own mother's maiden name, written against a date that had not come yet.

I left the lamp burning on the ladder that night so the gentleman could be seen from the street, and went home to sleep for once without listening for the wind.