Flash sheet of drawn designs including crossed knives, a coiled snake, a dog's head, a bottle labelled Kingpin and a beetle, in navy and orange on cream.

Flash sheet of knives, snakes and objects

Colour · Flash

A tall flash sheet of many separate drawn designs arranged in a grid, including crossed knives, a coiled snake, a German shepherd head, a sneaker with a spider, a hand, a coffin and a stag beetle. The linework is bold and dark navy with orange accents, and much of the detail is built from halftone dot shading on a cream background. Each motif sits in its own space, with faint background lettering and shapes behind the main images.

Knife Snake Dog Bottle Hand Coffin Beetle Spider Sneaker Eye Lightning Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter came pinned under the windscreen wiper of Ada Mercer's Austin, folded twice around a tide table. One typed line on the back: Ask Pelham where the Kingpin went. She read it twice in the rain outside the Crown, then folded it into her glove box and went inside to pull pints for men who never looked up from their drinks.

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Pelham ran the chandlery on Quay Street and the matchbox shop beside it, and for eleven years he had sold the town everything it needed to light a fire and fish a river. Ada went in at closing time. He was counting brass lures into a tobacco tin, the hooks catching the bulb overhead. "Somebody's been writing to me," she said. He didn't look up. "Somebody's always writing."

She found the bottle that night, in the stockroom, behind crates of razor blades stamped with a name nobody in town would say aloud. The label had faded but the skull was clear as a coin. A coffin-shaped box sat under the shelf with a cross cut into its lid, and she understood, with a cold drop in her stomach, that the box had been waiting for someone to fill it. Beside it lay a pair of wooden matches, their heads painted like tiny skulls, and a note in Pelham's neat hand: Ada, never the snitch. Never the fish.

At dawn she drove to the harbour wall with the letter in her coat. The tide was coming in grey over the mud, and Pelham's van sat on the quay with its back doors open and nobody inside. She stood a long time with the engine ticking. Then she took the letter out, unfolded it against the wheel, and dropped it into the tin of lures she had carried from the shop without quite meaning to. She shut the lid and let the water have the rest.