Black and gold golden snitch tattoo with feathered wings and the words 'It's real for us' across the top of a foot.

Golden snitch and 'It's real for us' on a foot

Other · Mixed · Photo

A golden snitch with black feathered wings sits across the top of a foot, with the words 'It's real for us' in black serif lettering above it. The wings use fine dark linework with hatched shading, and the ball is filled with orange-gold ink with darker detailing. The tattoo is centred on the skin, with a white surface visible at the edges of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the sawdust, it gets in everything. You want to hear about the Gilded Orrery? That was the last act the old Harrowgate Big Top had left, and it was run by a woman called Mabel Quaite, who had lost her husband to the rail strike and the sight of one eye to a stray hoop. She kept one thing in a tin box under the ticket table: a brass-and-gold ball no bigger than a plum, with wings of real black feather glued on by a clockmaker in Leeds who swore they would never fly.

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They flew. Every night at the close, when the lamps were turned low and the last of the crowd had gone grumbling into the drizzle, Mabel would open the box and whistle one note, and the ball would lift out and dart the length of the tent, wings whirring like a moth against a window. Nobody paid for that. Nobody saw it but the lad who swept the ring, a boy called Tobias Vane who could not read a poster but could count the seconds the ball hung in the air.

One October the council came with papers, and the tent was to come down on the Friday. On the Thursday Tobias found the tin standing open and the ball gone cold and still. He sat in the empty ring until the sky went grey, whistling the note wrong, then right, and then something came fluttering down out of the rafters and settled on his palm, warm as a sleeping hen.

Mabel never came back for the tent. Tobias kept the box and the ball, and above his bed in the rooms over the chip shop he pinned a scrap of canvas where she had painted the words in her careful hand: It's real for us. When people laughed at him for it, he only shrugged and whistled, and the ball, tired as it was, always came.