White line drawing on black of a winged cherub with curly hair holding a heart-shaped banner that reads Clarence Alabama, in a traditional flash style.

Cherub with heart banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a line drawing of a winged cherub with curly hair, wings spread wide, and a heart-shaped banner held across its body. The banner carries the words Clarence and Alabama in script, and the cherub's legs trail out to the right. The linework is solid white on a black background, with no shading or added colour.

Traditional Cherub Angel Wing Heart Banner Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherub came over in a crate stamped with a Mobile postmark, and by the time I had levered the lid off, the pear trees along the south wall were already in blossom. Nobody at Hollins Court had ordered it. Inside, wrapped in a shirt that smelled of cedar and cigarettes, was a little winged boy with his cheeks puffed like a trumpeter, holding a heart-shaped banner across his belly. Someone had painted the names on it in looping letters: Clarence, and beneath that, Alabama.

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I took it to Mrs Pryce, who had been head gardener for thirty-one years and had opinions about everything that came through the gate. She turned it over, tapped one wing with a fingernail, and said it was the sort of thing a man buys when he means to apologise and has run out of words. Then she told me to set it in the bed by the sundial, where the lavender was going leggy, and to stop staring.

The letter came in June, tucked under the drainpipe of the potting shed. A woman wrote that Clarence had been her father, a sign painter who had carved cherubs for the cemetery monuments back home. The lettering was his, she said, and the two names were a pair of towns he had driven between for most of his life, never once stopping in the second. She had sent the cherub because he had asked for it on the day his hands gave out, and she did not know where else a thing like that belonged.

I left it where it was. By August the lavender had filled out, and the cherub sat with his legs trailing into the thyme, looking, as Mrs Pryce said, like a boy who has been told to wait and has decided to wait very loudly.