Colour Traditional-style tattoo of a cartoon woman with brown hair, glasses and a green jacket above a banner reading MISUNDERSTOOD, on an upper arm.

Cartoon character with misunderstood banner on arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A flat, cartoon-style portrait of a woman with shoulder-length brown hair, thick-framed glasses, a green jacket and an orange top, shown with arms folded. The bold black outlines and solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, and the design sits on a curled orange banner with the word MISUNDERSTOOD in black capitals. Surrounding tattoos in red, yellow, green and blue fill the frame, and the photograph is in sharp focus.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The archive committee wants the sleeve catalogued by Thursday, and you have spent the morning on a single green jacket. Sub-level nine of the Kessler Reach library keeps its paper dry and its staff suspicious, and the woman on the scan in front of you has been held in the same pose for eleven hours: arms crossed, glasses pushed up, mouth shut against the world. Someone inked her on a shoulder in a city that no longer exists, and the file came up with a note that said only misunderstood.

Keep reading

Your supervisor, Idris Vale, leans over the bench with a mug of recycled tea. 'Nobody wants a decade of sarcasm filed as a primary source,' he says. You tell him the banner is the only honest part of it. He tells you that is exactly the problem. You know what he means. You have been misread by every committee since you were transferred up from the lower ring, your reports skimmed for tone, your jokes logged under hazards.

That night you open the drawer where you keep your own old sketches, the ones nobody asked for. You turn them over one at a time until you find the page where you drew her again, badly, with the lettering wrapped the wrong way round. Underneath, in pencil, you add a line for whoever opens the file next: The jacket was never the point. Keep the arms folded.

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