Traditional colour tattoo of an inhaler wrapped in a banner reading Catch My Breath, placed on a calf.

Inhaler with Catch My Breath banner on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A bold traditional tattoo shows a blue-grey inhaler with a spacer chamber at its base and a red mouthpiece cap, wrapped by an orange banner lettered CATCH MY BREATH. Thick black outlines define each element, with simple flat fills in blue, grey, red and orange. The design is centred on the calf and fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Traditional Calf Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came in off the Channel before the breakfast gong, and by seven Mr Ayling was sitting on the bottom stair with one hand pressed flat against his waistcoat. I was nine that summer and paid for my keep at Seaview House in tea and dusting, which meant I was the one sent running. Mother kept the spare inhaler in the biscuit tin with the sewing buttons, under a folded tea towel, and I knew its rattle from the landing.

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Mr Ayling would not be fussed over. He took the inhaler the way a man takes a dare, shook it twice against his palm and fitted the grey spacer onto the mouthpiece with its red cap still on. "Count for me, Ada's girl," he said. "Don't let me go faster than the gulls." So I counted in the hall, one for each brass tile, while the sea grumbled against the groyne outside and the barometer by the door stuck fast at Change.

Halfway through the sixth count he laughed, a rough little sound, and said his late wife had painted that orange banner on everything she owned: the coal scuttle, the bicycle bell, the frame of the hall mirror. CATCH MY BREATH, it read, in letters faded to the colour of old marmalade. "Only ever meant the sea," he said. "She had a way of making a joke out of being frightened."

By the time the gong went, he was standing with his shoulders down, and the fog had thinned to a pale window over the pier. Mother came through with the porridge and looked at the two of us as if we had been caught in the jam. I put the tin back under the tea towel and said nothing about the red cap in my pocket, which I turned over in my palm all day, the way you worry a stone until the tide takes it back.