Watercolour flash design of a blue genie lamp with a hand rising from it and 'You're free' in blue script lettering above.

Genie lamp with 'You're free' script

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A blue watercolour illustration of a genie lamp with a gold collar, with a hand rising from its spout. The words 'You're free' are written above in flowing blue script, with a small black and gold swirl and a few blue droplets around the hand. The design sits centred on white paper, with a real hand partly visible at the left edge.

Lettering Hand Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Dover, the lamp sits in the grey tray between your passport and a bag of boiled sweets, and the officer has already asked you twice whether it is a teapot. You tell him it belonged to your aunt, who kept it on a windowsill for forty years and polished the gold collar every Sunday with the hem of her apron. That is true, as far as it goes. You do not mention the wish you made as a child, or how she used to say the house needed one more thing to breathe.

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The officer lifts the lamp to peer at its base. His thumb brushes the spout, and the queue behind you goes quiet as a thin blue smoke curls out, smelling of cardamom and wet paper. A hand rises from the spout, blue as the Channel on a clear morning, and makes a small, impatient gesture at the strip lights overhead.

Nobody in the hall moves. The officer sets the lamp down very carefully, as if it might be hot. The genie unfolds itself with a long creak of joints, looks at the ceiling, the flags, the sniffing dog on its lead, and then at you. "Right," it says, in the voice of someone who has waited a long time for a form to be signed. "Well. You're free."

Your passport comes back stamped, and the officer waves you through without another word. When you look back from the car park, the lamp is still sitting in the tray, its collar gleaming, and a little blue smoke is drifting towards the ceiling, where it seems to be looking for the exit.