Black linework tattoo of a small cartoon character with a pencil resting across the top, on the lower leg above a grey sock.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon character with pencil on lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A small cartoon character with square body, large round eyes, and stubby legs is drawn in black outline with light grey shading on the lower leg. A pencil lies diagonally across the top of the design, and part of another tattoo with swirling linework is visible at the upper right. The background is a plain pale wall and the sock is grey knit.

Calf Cartoon character Pencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorrit had the bakery to herself for eleven minutes before the ovens reached temperature, and she spent them counting trays. Forty-two buns, nine plaits, one tray of soda bread that had risen crooked again. She was a square sponge of a creature, porous and yellow as old custard, and the tall windows showed her reflection in a way she had never quite trusted. Mr Oduya's order list was pinned to the flour bin, written in the stubby pencil he insisted on, because ink, he said, lied about how much you meant to change.

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The trouble was the slip from the harbour hotel. It had asked for three hundred rolls by six, and it had arrived with a coffee ring and a thumbprint. Dorrit climbed onto an upturned crate, held the pencil up to the lamp the way Oduya did when he was thinking, and squinted at the number under the stain. It could be thirty. It could be three hundred. A pencil, she decided, was the only honest tool for a problem like this, because you could rub out a mistake and nobody would ever need to know you had been wrong.

At ten to five the back door rattled. Oduya came in with his scarf wound twice round his neck, took one look at her standing on the crate with the pencil raised above her head like a flag, and laughed so hard he had to sit down on the proving bench. "Thirty," he said, wiping his eyes. "Always thirty. That hotel writes like a man on a boat." She climbed down, stung and relieved in equal measure, and went to start the dough.

By six the first van was loaded with thirty rolls and a note apologising for the confusion, which Dorrit wrote herself in careful capitals. Outside, the harbour had turned the colour of weak tea, and she stood in the doorway with flour on her edges, watching gulls argue over a dropped crust. Some mornings, she thought, the whole town was waiting on somebody to pick up a pencil.