Flash sheet of five cartoon characters in a zombie-style neo-traditional design with bold black outlines and pastel watercolour washes, including a skull, crossed bones and a bottle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five cartoon characters in watercolour flash sheet

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A flash sheet of five separate cartoon designs on a cream background: a bald figure with bulging eyes, a clown-like figure above crossed bones, a skull with a dripping brain on top, a face emerging from a bottle, and a figure with a cleaver in its head. Each design uses thick black outlines with soft pastel watercolour washes in pink, blue, yellow and green. The designs are arranged in a loose scatter with splashes of colour behind them.

Neo-trad Cartoon character Skull Bottle Zombie Brain Clown Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, you're letting the flies in. Right, the road out past Coyote Wells, where the tarmac gives up and the sand takes over. Every salesman who ever drove it knew about Ada Penhallow's tonic wagon, painted pink and yellow like a mouthwash bottle, with a sign that said Cures Everything Except Moving On. She sold her stuff by the cup, and the cup was always full of something that fizzed.

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The night Dale Corbin pulled in with a flat tyre and a grudge against his mother-in-law, Ada was sat on her step with a clown's ruff hung on the hook, counting coins with her teeth. She told him the bottle on the shelf had a face in it. He laughed. The face laughed back, a little late, the way a man does when he hasn't decided yet. Dale bought a bottle to be polite, and by morning he had a bone-white grin pressed against the glass and a taste of blue sand on the wrong side of his gums.

He drove that road for a month trying to find her again. Every town had a wagon in the square, and every wagon had a collar like a lampshade and a skull lidded with a brain of frothing sugar. None of them had Ada. Only the bottles, lined up in the heat, each with a little face in it, keeping its own counsel.

So if you go out past Coyote Wells and see a tonic cart with its wheels sunk in the sand, don't buy a cup. Just nod to the crossed bones on the lid and keep your hands on the wheel. And if the bottle on the dashboard starts to fizz, pull over quick and get out before it asks you to pay.