Pencil sketch of Jack and Sally dancing across two curling banners, with the words We can live like Jack and Sally if we want, as a tattoo design.

Jack and Sally design with banners

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of the skeletal character Jack and the rag-doll character Sally dancing together, wrapped by three curling banners that carry the lettering. The linework is fine and sketchy, with cross-hatched shading on the clothing and banners. The image is black and grey only, on a plain white background.

Sally Banner Lettering Skeleton Scroll Sketch

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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

The snow shut the Hollow road by four, and by six Mrs Abernethy was counting candles aloud, as if saying the number might stretch them. Five of us were stranded at the Crook and Lantern: two surveyors fighting over a map of a bridge that wasn't there, a widow with a grey parrot called Admiral, Tom who swept the stables for his keep, my husband Eli, and me. We had come with the Christmas salt cod and stayed.

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Eli and I had not spoken civilly since October. He sat at the hearth, boots steaming, jaw set like a gate. Tom found a battered picture book under the settle, one Mrs Abernethy kept for her grandson, about a pumpkin-faced skeleton in a striped suit and a girl stitched together from rags. Tom read it in a squeaky voice until the surveyors laughed. On the last page someone had pencilled a line in the margin: We can live like Jack and Sally if we want.

Nobody meant anything by it, I think, but Eli stood up. He bowed the way he used to at the Whitsun dances before the mill shut and the bowing went out of him. He held out a hand, long fingers stiff as a clerk's, and I took it because the parrot was screeching and the candles were down to four. We went across the flagstones in small careful turns, his shoes squeaking, my skirts catching the firelight. Mrs Abernethy snuffed one candle to save wax, so the last part we danced by the coals alone, while the surveyors clapped out of time.

By morning the wind had dropped and the road lay like a white ribbon under a sky the colour of cold tin. Eli shovelled the path to the cart without being asked. At the gate he turned back, face half-hidden in his scarf, and said, "Same time next winter, then." I couldn't tell if he was joking, and I didn't ask. I hummed the parrot's tune all the way home.