Traditional style colour tattoo of a girl with a red bow riding a purple rocket, with a grey and yellow bird flying above her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl on a rocket with a bird above

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style girl with black hair and a red bow sits on a purple rocket with yellow flames at its base. She wears a green dress patterned with yellow stars, and a grey and yellow bird flies above her on the left. Bold black outlines and flat areas of solid colour fill the design, set against pale skin.

Traditional Girl Rocket Bird Star Bow Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rocket had sat behind the chip shop in Margate since April, nose propped on two breeze blocks, and the council had written to Nell Pritchard twice about it. She ignored both letters. The magpie nesting in the gutter above her kitchen window had opinions about the rocket and shared them loudly every morning, usually around six.

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On the morning she finally fuelled it, using lamp oil and a tin of her late father's marmalade for reasons she never fully worked out, the bird landed on the gantry rail and cocked its head. "Not that way," it said, in the flat voice of a man reading the shipping forecast. "Start with the gold stars on your left sleeve. The yellow ones are the bad ones." Nell had been told worse things by better-dressed people, so she buckled on her green coat, the one with the gold stars she had stitched on herself, and climbed in.

They went up over the pier, past the big wheel that no longer turned, and out to where the sky thinned to blue-black. The bird navigated by tapping each star on her coat with its beak and muttering their names, which were mostly the names of her aunts. At the edge of the air the flames under the rocket spluttered, and for a moment she thought the trip was finished, until the magpie pointed at a faint silver smudge and said, "There. That's where the moon keeps its spare lids."

She came back at teatime with a jam jar of moonlight that turned out to be mostly cold. The magpie took the lid as payment, flew twice round the chimney, and settled on the rocket's nose as if it had always belonged there. The next morning the council sent a third letter. Nell pinned it to the fridge beside the first two, under a drawing of a rocket with a bow on its tail.