Traditional colour tattoo of an inhaler wrapped in a cream banner reading Ain't easy bein' wheezy, shown close up on skin.

Inhaler and banner reading Ain't easy bein' wheezy

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A traditional style tattoo of an inhaler with a grey cap, red body and blue-grey mouthpiece, wrapped by a cream banner with black lettering. Bold black outlines and flat shading define the forms, with a limited palette of red, orange, blue and grey. The design is shown close up against pale skin, with the banner centred over the inhaler.

Traditional Lettering Banner Lettering Text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mavis had timed the Saturday waltz so she could slip out before the band struck up, but Frank Doyle caught her hand at the cloakroom door and asked whether she'd sit this one out with him. He held his inhaler the way other men held cigarettes, grey cap already twisted off, red body warm from his coat pocket. "Ain't easy being wheezy," he said, and grinned at the joke he'd been using since the Coronation.

Keep reading

They sat on the bench under the mirror ball while the musicians tuned up. Frank counted the quickstep under his breath, one-two-three, one-two-three, and told her the doctor on Hollins Road had said dancing would finish him off, so he'd given it up the way other men gave up drink. "Dancing in my head," he said. "Terrible partner. Never treads on anyone." Mavis laughed, then regretted it, because the laugh tipped into a cough of her own and she had to press a hand to her ribs until it passed.

She confessed she'd been practising all week in her kitchen, with the wireless for music and the mop for a partner, and the mop had proved hopeless. Frank looked at the floor where the couples were turning, then offered her his arm for the slow number. He said they would go one step to every breath he could spare, and that he would need to stop often, and that she was not to fuss.

They went out on the slow foxtrot. He paused twice to puff, and each time she waited with her hand on his elbow while the band played on without them. When the lights came up at eleven, the inhaler lay forgotten on the bench with its cap off, the blue mouthpiece dented where his thumb had rested for forty years.