Joker face sketch with Love is a Joke lettering
Lettering · Mixed · Flash
A hand-drawn face with heavy dark smudged eye makeup, blue irises and a wide red smiling mouth, drawn in pencil on white paper. Below it, the words Love is a Joke are written in black decorative script, and a small symbol sits above the eyebrows. Red and blue coloured pencils and black pens lie around the edges of the sheet.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The skipper of the Mary Wren painted his face before every dawn sailing out of Ardglass, and the fleet had long stopped asking why. Red wax for the mouth, a thumb of soot dragged beneath each eye, and blue for the eyes, so that the men on the quay said the boat went out laughing and came back quiet. Nobody had ever seen him wipe it off.
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His daughter Nessa mended nets on the next pier and spoke to nobody about the winter her mother walked into the water off the Calf. She kept a sheet of paper pinned in the net loft, and on it she drew her father's face again and again, always with the same wide grin and the same black rings. Beneath each one she wrote the saying he had taught her: love is a joke, and the sea is the punchline.
One March the boat did not come back on the tide. The men searched the grey water until the light failed, and on the third morning the Mary Wren drifted in under a torn sail with nobody at the wheel, only a red pencil lying on the boards. Nessa found the drawing rolled inside the forward hatch, finished in pencil, the tears running down in long smudged lines.
She pinned it up with the others. That spring she came down to the boats with her own mouth painted red, and the gulls, who had learned his shriek, went quiet to watch her.
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