Traditional style colour tattoo of a green pickle inside an ornate gold scrollwork frame with a banner reading The Pickle, on the calf.

Green pickle in an ornate frame on a leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A green pickle with yellow-orange spots sits in the centre of an ornate frame with gold and brown scrollwork, shaded to look raised. A banner beneath the pickle reads THE PICKLE in tan lettering with a dark outline. The bold outlines and flat, saturated fills are set against plain skin and a dark background.

Traditional Calf Frame Scrollwork Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Harvest Fair believed Ada Ostler's cucumber had won fair, and the judges sat on the frame for an hour before they'd hand it over. I know because I was holding the jar when the red-faced one said the word brine like it tasted of tin. Let me tell it properly, since you're all leaning in like gulls over chips.

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That pickle had sat in a stone crock under the Ostler stairs since August, green as a bottle end and freckled gold where the seeds had split the skin. Ada swore the brine was salted with seawater she'd fetched herself from Dungeness in a milk can, and a woman who will do that will do anything. Walter Pell had taken the onions prize nine years running and he was not a man who enjoyed being beaten by a vegetable with a dignified bend in it. On the Thursday night, he was seen going up the back lane with a lantern and a face like a shut door.

So the judges had a jar on the trestle at dawn, and a pickle in it that was not quite the one Ada had put down. The bumps were wrong. The green had gone chalky at one end. Ada went white, then pink, then she sat down on a hay bale and laughed until she wept into her apron. Walter's onions were in a Kilner jar on the next table, and under the lid, folded small, was a note in her own handwriting: 'You may have the frame, Walter, but the pickle was always mine.'

The judges gave the gold scrollwork to the one that tasted best, which was Ada's, real or not. They painted THE PICKLE on a tan board and hung it over the bar, where it still is, and where Walter buys his round every Friday with the face of a man who knows exactly what he did.