Colour tattoo of a bearded gnome in a red hat and blue jacket beside a red-spotted mushroom on a lower leg.

Gnome with red hat and mushroom on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A bearded gnome in a pointed red hat, blue jacket, mustard belt and brown trousers stands on grassy ground, glancing upwards. A red mushroom with white spots rises beside him, with grass and small stones at the base. Black outlines define the figures, and soft colour shading gives the jacket and beard their texture, with the design filling the frame vertically.

Calf Mushroom Beard Grass Stone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now keep your heads still, because the gnome is looking up, and a gnome looking up is never good news for anybody holding a paper cone of sugared almonds. Old Tobiah Crane carried him on the back of the big caravan for thirty years, wrapped in a feed sack, and at every pitch the gnome was set down by the nearest patch of grass so he could keep an eye on the ground. Tobiah swore the gnome liked the damp. The children swore he moved when nobody was looking. Both were right.

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That August the fair pitched on Mallory's Common, and the gnome was placed beside a toadstool the size of a cartwheel. Peg Ransome, who was eight and had opinions, climbed onto the toadstool to watch the Ferris wheel and kicked the gnome's boot clean off. Nobody saw what happened next except the wheel, which stopped halfway round with a shriek, and the boy in the red cap who had been swinging at the top. He came down with his cap in his hand and no memory of how he got there.

The fair moved on at dawn. The gnome did not come with it. Tobiah searched three fields and a ditch, then found him on the Brackley road, planted up to his belt in a farmer's cabbage patch, staring at the sky above the church tower as if he had bet someone a shilling on it. The farmer's daughter said he had been standing there since Tuesday and would not be moved. Tobiah tried. The gnome's face, even in clay, said no.

So if you ever pass a gnome on that road, red hat tipped back and a beard like a snowdrift, leave him be. He is not lost. He is only waiting for the wheel to start turning again.