Traditional style colour tattoo on a upper back of a castle inside a mouse head silhouette, with red and orange fireworks in the ears.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle and fireworks in a mouse head on a back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large castle with grey walls, teal spires and yellow-outlined arches sits inside a black mouse head silhouette. Two red and orange fireworks burst in the rounded ears, and a red glow sits behind the castle. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills give it a classic traditional finish on smooth skin.

Traditional Back Castle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are three weeks out from Lisbon when the fireworks crate turns up in the forward locker, stencilled with a name you don't recognise and a note in the purser's looping hand: for the Captain's gala, do not open before the Azores. You have been aboard long enough to know that an instruction like that is a dare.

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Night watch. You take the lamp down to the hold with Teodor, the youngest stoker, who keeps a tin of boiled sweets in his jacket and offers you one before he offers you the time. The crate is lighter than it should be. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, are six paper shells and a folded drawing of a grey castle set inside a black head with two round ears, painted in the flat, bold colours of old sailors' flash. Teodor laughs so hard he has to sit down on a coil of rope. "Someone's been dreaming of a far-off place," he says.

You spend the next night rigging the shells along the rail while the sea goes black and smooth as slate. The drawing is pinned above the wheel. The mate says it looks like a boy's cap. The cook says it looks like a house someone left behind. At midnight the Captain's wife lights the first fuse herself, and the sky over the mid-Atlantic opens red and orange above the wake, the ears of the drawing burning briefly in the air before the smoke rolls over them.

Afterwards, the purser finds you coiling wet fuse wire on the aft deck. She says the crate was never meant for the gala. It was meant for her brother, who drew the castle on the back of a menu forty years ago and promised to bring fireworks to the house he would never own. You fold the drawing carefully and put it in your breast pocket, where it stays dry for the rest of the crossing.