Black ink tattoo of two crossed chequered racing flags on the forearm, close to the wrist, against a white bed sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed chequered flags on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two chequered racing flags crossed over each other, with the flag poles drawn as thin diagonal lines. The design is rendered in solid black ink with grey-toned checks and some softness at the edges. It is photographed close up on a forearm near the wrist against a plain white background.

Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flags lived in a Quality Street tin under the ticket box, two of them, rolled tight and smelling of paraffin. Nobody had waved them since the summer the Boswell Brothers pulled into Skegness and the crowds came to watch Ray Dunmore ride the Wall of Death with his hands off the bars. Mam said the flags were bad luck. Dad said they were the only honest thing we owned, because they told you when a thing was finished.

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By the autumn the big top was patched with feed sacks and the elephant had gone to a farm near Louth. Dad still climbed into the steel drum every evening, the engine coughing up to thirty, but the crowd was eleven pensioners and a lurcher. I sat on the bottom step with the tin on my knees and counted their claps, which were never more than nine.

On the last night the generator died halfway through the ride. In the sudden dark the engine ticked and the drum stayed silent, and Dad leaned over the rail and looked straight at me. I fetched the flags. We crossed the poles in the sawdust, one chequered square over the other, and I raised them high enough for the old folk to see. The generator caught again. Dad rode three slow laps with the light swinging, then cut the engine himself, and the pensioners got to their feet and clapped until the sawdust settled.

He folded the flags back into the tin that night without a word, and for the first time I understood why he had kept them.