Colour tattoo of a flower-painted VW Beetle wrapped in smoke, sitting on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower power VW Beetle on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A VW Beetle is painted with daisies, a blue flower, and peace symbols in orange, yellow, purple and blue, with a smoky grey cloud surrounding it. The car has soft shading and bold outlines, and the smoke is rendered in greys that fade into the skin. The design fills the frame diagonally across the side of the torso.

Ribs Car Flower Daisy Peace symbol Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of August the Beetle has become a joke along the quay at Porthkennick, a rust-brown hump under the net loft that nobody admits to owning. You sand the bonnet anyway, because Dessa Pryce asked you to and because her brother left it to her with a note that said only *take it to the sea*. You don't know what that means. You suspect she doesn't either.

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Paint comes from the chandler's in tins that smell of linseed and mistakes. Orange for the body, because the evening sun on it makes it look like something warm left out to cool. Then the blue for the wings, the purple for the roof, and the daisies you do freehand with the back of a brush handle, five petals each, as if you were eight. Peace signs go on the doors, then on the wheels, until the car looks less like an old car and more like a loud idea somebody had on a Tuesday.

Dessa doesn't like the cloud. She says it makes the car look like it's driving out of its own weather. You argue that is the point. On the last evening you blend grey smoke around the rear arches, thinning it with spirit until it fades into the bare concrete, while she stands with her arms folded and watches the gulls come down for the chip papers.

At first light you wheel the Beetle down the slip. The engine coughs, catches, and the paint shines wet in the harbour glow. Dessa lifts one hand off the wheel. You stand at the bollard and watch the daisies go out past the breakwater, small and bright and impossible to miss, the way she always meant them to be.