Colour tattoo of the Joker grinning beside a camera and playing cards, with HA HA lettering, on the upper arm.

Joker with camera on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a comic-book style Joker with green hair and a wide yellow-toothed grin, holding a vintage camera up towards the viewer. Playing cards and repeated HA lettering in pink and purple fill the background around the figure. The linework is bold and dark, with shading in blue, purple, green and red inks inside a square black panel.

Upper arm Joker Camera Playing card Comic character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ellis kept the only camera in Hollin Row in a cocoa tin under his bed, and on Saturdays he carried it up the back lane to the pit gates. The men came off the day shift grey to the eyebrows, and he lined them against the chapel wall, lifted the black box to his eye and told them the same joke every week. Nobody laughed. They took their sixpenny prints home anyway, because a face on card was cheaper than a holiday.

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I sorted the penny comics at the Co-op, so I knew the Joker before anyone in the village had heard of him. He had a green mop of hair and a grin like a split tin of paint, and he was forever dealing cards out of his coat at men who had nothing to lose. I cut him out of a torn book and gave him to Ellis for the back of his lens cap. 'Make them look like that,' I said, and he said grown men do not grin like that, Nell, not in a mining town.

Then Owen Parry came off the night shift with a cough that rattled like a loose hopper, and he stood before the wall with his cap in his hands and no intention of smiling. Ellis fiddled with the bellows. I stepped into the frame with the cut-out held up beside my face, pulling my lips down and my eyes wide, and Owen looked at me as if I had lost my wits. Then he laughed, a proper bark that turned into coughing, and Ellis caught it on the plate.

The print came out of the darkroom a week later, smudged at the edges. Owen was grinning with his whole face, and behind him Ellis had scratched playing cards and pink HA letters onto the negative until the chapel wall looked like a carnival. Owen bought three. He pinned one above his bed, he told me, where the coal dust could not get at it.