Tattoo of a Heinz Tomato Ketchup bottle with a red tomato on an upper arm, with handwritten lettering and a small orange bird beneath it.

Heinz ketchup bottle and lettering on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of an upper arm in a red t-shirt sleeve, with a tattooed Heinz Tomato Ketchup bottle outline containing a red tomato and green leaves. Handwritten black lettering runs down the arm beside it, and a small orange bird and a red figure sit lower down. The bottle has bold black outlines with flat red, green and orange fills, and the lettering is in plain black ink.

Upper arm Bottle Lettering Bird Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lift's been broken since Tuesday so you'll have to take the stairs like everybody else. Fourteen floors. You can do it. Old Dessie Riordan did it every night for thirty years with a bad hip and a bottle of brown sauce in each pocket, and he never once complained about the stairs.

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He ran the chippy under the flats, and in 1987 the Heinz rep came round with a crate of the red stuff and a poster of a bottle with a tomato on it, all sparkle and promise. Dessie stuck the poster up behind the counter. Every Friday after close he'd sit on the back step with the last bottle of the week, the one with the dent, and talk to it. Talk to the tomato, mostly. Said it had the easiest life of anything in the city: grown, squeezed, bottled, shaken, and sent out to be loved by chips.

A lad from block C, Terry's boy, came down one summer with a bird in his hand, half-dead, a robin with a bent wing. Dessie splinted it with a lolly stick and a bit of tape and kept it on the windowsill in a shoebox. The robin lived. It sang at sunrise over the car park every morning until the day it didn't, and Dessie said, plainly, that's the way of it, lad. You come in with everything and you go out with the bits you were given.

He wrote it on the back of an order pad in biro, the way he wrote everything, and taped it to the step: I came to this world and I'll leave with everything else I got. Right underneath, the bottom line, every thing that happens is for something. He never finished that line. Nobody's ever been sure what the something was, mind, but the step's still there, and so are the stairs.