Traditional colour tattoo on the top of a foot showing a dripping drain cover, a banner reading IT'S OUR TIME and DOWN HERE, and two red flowers with green leaves.

Drain banner and red flowers on a foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A traditional style tattoo on the top of a foot shows a round drain or grate with blue water spilling over its rim and dripping down the side. A curved yellow banner with black lettering reading IT'S OUR TIME wraps above it, and a second banner reading DOWN HERE sits below, with a red flower and dark green leaves at each end. Bold black outlines, flat red, blue, yellow and green fills and a plain pale background give a clear, graphic composition.

Traditional Other Water Banner Lettering Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody upstairs ever looked down the grate on Lowther Street, which suited the things that lived beneath it. Rain came through in a steady rope of silver each November, bringing crisp packets, lost gloves and once a wedding ring that Dora Pask had been carrying for her sister. Down in the brick throat of the drain, the ring hung on a nail above the sluice, and the keeper, a heavy old eel called Mr Gammon, wrote every arrival into a ledger with a stub of blue chalk.

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The trouble began when the council sent men with a van and a cement mixer. Mr Gammon heard them through the iron bars, tapping and sealing, and the water began to back up, climbing the bricks in a slow blue tide. He called the others from the culverts: the rats with their rain-cracked whiskers, the two matchseller sisters who kept their stock in a tin, and the old tram bell that still rang whenever the current was strong enough to shake it.

They gathered under the grate where the streetlight came down in stripes. It's our time, the bell said, though it had no tongue, and Mr Gammon, who had never once raised his voice in forty years of ledgers, agreed. They would not drown quietly. They pushed the water up over the rim in one great spill, and it ran across the pavement carrying the ring, the gloves and a drift of wet pages past the workmen's boots.

The next morning the men found the grate open and dripping, and a single red paper flower lying on the step. One of them tipped his hat to it and phoned in to cancel the job. Down here, the ledger said in fresh chalk, we are still counting.