Traditional style tattoo on a thigh showing a black banner reading KEDZIE above two teal bars with four red stars, which together form the Chicago flag.

Chicago flag and banner on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a thigh wearing a tattoo of the Chicago flag, with two teal horizontal bars enclosing four red six-pointed stars. A black-outlined banner reading KEDZIE sits above the flag design, with shaded folds and a clean, bold outline. The colour is applied on a plain skin background with denim shorts at the top of the frame and a shop shelf visible behind.

Traditional Thigh Banner Star Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 52 out of Kedzie never ran on time in February, and Walter Dabrowski knew it better than anyone. He kept a flask of stewed tea wedged beside the fare box and a pair of gloves on the dashboard that his late wife had knitted in a teal the depot painters called wrong. He had driven the route for thirty-one years, from the rail yards at the southern end, past the laundromats and the Polish bakery, up to where the avenue finally gives out near the river. You learned the stops the way other men learned hymns, by feel and without thinking.

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The new girl started on a Monday. She sat behind him with a clipboard and asked why he never called out the cross streets. "They know where they are," he said. "The ones who need to know will ask." She wrote that down. By Friday she had filled four pages with timings, and on the Saturday she rode the whole loop without speaking until the bus turned into the depot yard at dusk, when the flag on the mast above the gate caught the last of the light, two bars of blue and four red stars standing out sharp against the grey.

She pointed at it. "Why four?" Walter shrugged, switched off the engine and let the bus tick as it cooled. "Nobody agrees," he said. "That's the honest answer. My father used to say each star was a fire or a flood, depending on who you bought your drink from." He took his gloves off one finger at a time. Then he handed her the clipboard, and she saw that the last page was blank except for a single line in his careful hand: Kedzie, end of the line, no one left behind.