Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chevrolet bowtie and flags on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a blue Chevrolet bowtie emblem with a silver outline sits across the upper arm, layered over two flags angled behind it. The flag on the left has red and white bands and a maple leaf, and the flag on the right is red with a blue saltire and white stars. The shading is soft and smooth, and the blurred background shows shelves, a skull drawing on the wall and a seated person in a blue top.

Upper arm Flag Maple leaf Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stitching on the Canadian flag had gone grey with years of cigarette smoke, and Wendell wanted it down before the insurance man came up the lane. I told him to leave it be. We had been snowed into the Lumber Road garage since Tuesday, two bays, one hoist and a blue bowtie badge bolted over the workbench since before either of us was born. Nobody in the valley had ever tried to take that badge down, so it seemed a poor week to start.

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Old Hal Mercer had brought the second flag across the river in 1968, a faded thing with a blue cross and white stars, and he had paid for a tow with it when his truck gave out on the bridge. He never came back for it. Wendell's father hung it beside the maple leaf out of plain politeness, and the two of them argued about the pair every winter like old dogs over one bone. Neither ever conceded a point. They just kept the flags up and the kettle on.

On the Thursday a woman's estate car slid into the ditch with two children asleep in the back, and Wendell went out in his shirtsleeves with the chains while I held the torch. He worked an hour without speaking. When the wheels finally bit, she pressed a folded note into his hand and drove off towards the bridge. He read it under the lamp and went quiet. It said only that she had seen the badge through the window from the road, and that it had brought her home.

That night Wendell lifted both flags off their hooks and hung them again, straighter than before, while the bowtie stayed where it was, bright against the grime. Still ugly, he said. Still ours, I said, and for once he didn't argue.