Full colour comic strip sleeve tattoo on an upper arm, with speech bubbles and a pin-up woman in a red skirt at the bottom.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Comic strip sleeve on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve made up of comic book panels, with a masked figure at the top, a man in a wide-brimmed hat, and a dark-haired woman in a red skirt and pearl necklace at the bottom. The linework is bold and black, with flat colour fills in yellow, red, blue and purple and some greyscale shading in the panels. The panels are stacked vertically down the arm, with speech bubbles carrying short lines of dialogue that are part of the design.

Upper arm Speech bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of rain the lettering on the Gaslight Arcade window has started to peel, and you are the only sign-painter left in Port Carrow who still mixes yellow the old way, with a little red to take the shine off. Mr Hale pays you in cigarettes and cold tea. He never asks why you keep glancing across the road at the woman in the red skirt who waits in the doorway of the Blue Lamp Café, pearls at her throat and a flat, patient mouth, as if she has already read the ending of your day.

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"It's rude to stare," she says the first time she catches you, and you nearly drop the brush into the bucket. Behind her a man in a wide-brimmed hat leans on the counter and asks, through the glass, how much. You cannot hear the answer, only the shape of it in the way his hat tips down and the shadow swallows his eyes. Later a masked courier from the docks, his face wrapped against the coal dust, passes you a folded envelope and says nothing at all.

On Saturday the envelope has your own name on it, written in a hand you recognise as your own. Inside is a sketch of the arcade window with a blank speech bubble floating above the glass, and a note asking you to fill it in before the paint dries. You realise you have been lettering the prices all week without reading them, and that the woman in the doorway has been waiting for you to finish the sentence.

You dip the brush, lay down one clean stroke of yellow, and write HOW MUCH? in the cramped capitals you learned from the comics. The bubble stays empty. You leave it that way, the paint still wet on the pavement, and walk away before anyone can ask you for the change.