Colour tattoo of a purple grape soda bottle cap with a safety pin through it, on the forearm.

Grape soda bottle cap and safety pin on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a grape soda bottle cap with the words GRAPE and SODA across its centre, a bunch of grapes at the top and a safety pin running through the cap. The outlines are bold and dark, with grey shading that gives the metal rim and pin some depth. Purple tones fill the cap and grapes, and the design sits centrally on the forearm against plain skin.

Forearm Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the fair came over the hill with its lorries groaning, and every autumn Mabel Corran sat on the back step of the candy wagon mending whatever the riders tore. She kept one bent safety pin in her apron pocket that she called her lucky pin, and she would not say where it came from.

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The night the Big Wheel stuck with a farmer's boy and his little sister in the highest seat, the man who ran the ride swore he had no spanner that would reach the bolt. The children were crying. Mabel walked the length of the midway with a crate of grape soda on her hip, opened one bottle with the edge of a tin tray, and pressed the cap flat against the iron hinge. She slid her pin through the crimped rim the way she would stitch a torn sleeve, and she pulled it tight.

The pin held the cap against the bolt long enough for the ratchet to bite. The wheel groaned, dropped a foot, and went on turning. The boy came down with purple on his fingers and asked her name, and she told him it was nothing a pin could not fix.

That cap stayed on the wagon shelf for forty years, rusted at the edges, its letters worn to a whisper of grey. Nobody asked her why she kept it. When she died they found the pin still threaded through the rim, and nobody had the heart to take it out.