Black ink flash sheet on aged paper showing a teapot, a winged key, a sorting hat, a trunk, round glasses and a triangle with a circle and vertical line.

Flash sheet of six small designs

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of six separate black ink designs on aged, creased paper: a teapot with a curling spout, a winged key, a pointed hat with a folded brim, a closed trunk with a small skull on its lock, round spectacles, and a triangle enclosing a circle with a vertical line. The teapot, hat and trunk use sketchy hatching and shading, while the glasses and triangle are simple bold outlines. The designs are spaced evenly across the sheet with no colour.

Teapot Hat Trunk Skull Glasses Triangle Circle Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ruddock had run the lost property hatch at Cannock Junction for thirty-one years and could tell a stolen umbrella from a forgotten one by how the owner stood at the counter. Tonight it was the trunk that troubled her, a dented thing with a brass lock shaped like a tiny skull, left on platform four by a man who paid in coins and asked for no receipt.

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She opened the ledger on the counter and turned back through her own handwriting. A teapot with a spout like a question mark. A pair of round spectacles folded inside a handkerchief. A hat that had sat on the bench for a fortnight and shifted its brim whenever anyone walked past. And a key with two silver wings, brought in by a boy who swore it hummed when he held it near the tracks. She had logged that one under sundries, which was a lie she had never told before.

At quarter past eleven the trunk clicked open by itself. Beneath a layer of faded timetables lay a flat triangle of tarnished metal, a circle set inside it and a single bar running down the middle. Nobody had ever signed for it, so nobody could claim it. The hat gave a small, grudging twitch on the bench, which she took for agreement.

She wrote one line in the ledger: found by the right person, claimed by no one. Then she locked the trunk, pocketed the humming key and put the spectacles on, so that for the first time in thirty-one years she could read every board on the platform without squinting.