Traditional style colour tattoo of a grey Dalek with red and yellow lightning bolts beneath a red banner reading To Victory, on the lower leg.

Dalek with lightning bolts on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A grey Dalek with a dome, eyestalk, plunger arm and studded casing is the central subject, with yellow and black lightning bolts crackling from its sides. A red banner lettered To Victory sits above it in bold capitals. Thick black outlines and simple shading on the metal give it a classic flash-sheet look, and the design fills most of the frame.

Traditional Calf Dalek Robot Lightning Lettering Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, shift your umbrellas, the lot of you, because the rain isn't stopping for anybody and neither am I. Stall nine, where the fish men used to be, my grandmother sold boiled sweets and lies in equal measure, and she swore this was true. The winter the river froze solid, a pepperpot of grey iron came rolling down Marrow Lane on three squealing legs like a kettle coming to the boil, and it stopped dead outside her stall.

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It had a dome on its head like a bruised pudding, a single blue eye on a stalk, and a plunger arm it kept waving over the stalls as if it were checking for dust. Every time it spoke, which was always the same two words, bolts of lightning crackled off its shoulders and the stallholders dived behind the cabbages. The words were "To Victory", and it said them to the frost, to the gulls, and to the bailiff's boy who tried to chalk its name on the cobbles.

Now my grandmother was no hero, and she knew it. But she had a jar of malt vinegar and a tin of rat poison the council had left unguarded, and she waited until the thing turned its dome to face the sleet. Then she emptied the jar straight into that blue eye. The lightning went wild, scorching the cobbles, and the pepperpot rocked on its legs and sang out its last victory in a voice like a cracked bell.

Scrap men carried it off the next morning. They say the blue eye is still sitting in a pawnshop on Tanner Street, blinking whenever the weather turns. So if your umbrella goes inside out tonight, friends, don't blame the wind. Hold it tight and wish the old woman luck.