Colour tattoo of a bronze Dalek above three red roses and a banner, in a traditional style on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dalek and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bronze-toned Dalek from Doctor Who sits at the centre of the design, with a banner above it and three red roses with green leaves below. The linework is bold and outlined, with shading on the Dalek's dome and roses. The tattoo uses mainly warm bronze, red and green inks, and it is framed close up on the outer thigh.

Traditional Neo-trad Thigh Dalek Doctor who Banner Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ray won the tin Dalek at the Blackpool amusements in 1987 by knocking three bottles off a shelf with a wooden ball, and he gave it to me the night he proposed, sitting on the bonnet of this van. Thirty years on it still lives on the shelf above the fryer, its bronze paint worn through to tin at the dome, one plunger arm bent where a drunk man once leaned on it. Nobody buys eggs from a van called EGGS at two in the morning for the poetry.

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At ten to two the taxi queue came round the corner in a wave of shouting. A lad with no buttons left on his shirt wanted six fried eggs, two rounds, and a lecture on whether I was trying to poison him. I cracked them one-handed on the edge of the pan, the only trick Ray ever taught me that stuck. 'Exterminate!' the lad yelled at the dome, pointing, and I said, 'Not until you've paid,' and he laughed so hard he dropped his change in the gutter. A girl in a yellow raincoat crouched down to help him find it, and between them they found a fiver nobody had owned up to losing.

Ray's ashes went into the Ribble in March. I still do the night shift, because the rent doesn't know he's gone and the cabbies still need feeding. He painted the roses on the side of the van the summer we bought it, three of them, red as the sauce bottles, and told me they'd outlast the eggs. He was right about that, though the paint is flaking now and I've stopped trying to touch them up.

At quarter to four the queue thinned to nothing. I wiped the grease off the Dalek's dome with my sleeve, and the sodium light from the Corn Exchange clock caught the bronze so that for a second it looked like something that had come a very long way to find a plate of eggs. I put the kettle on for the last two cabbies and let the plunger arm point at the door.