Black and grey flash drawing of a lipstick tube wrapped with pearls and a bow above a heart-shaped base, with sparkle lines, in a traditional style, not shown on a body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lipstick with bow and pearls flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a lipstick tube tilted diagonally, with a string of pearls wrapped around its middle and a bow tied beneath. A heart-shaped base with a banded pattern sits at the bottom, and short radiating lines suggest sparkle around the object. The bold black outlines are filled with grey pencil or ink shading on a pale background, with other partial designs visible at the edges.

Traditional Lipstick Bow Pearl Heart Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lipstick rolled off the galley shelf just as the lock gates groaned shut, and I caught it one-handed, the way you learn to catch anything aboard the Patience. It was a short gold-cased thing, bent where someone had knocked it against a tin. The tin was heart-shaped and striped like a barber's pole, and it had been wedged under the bunk since before I bought the boat.

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Dad always said a narrowboat was a box of other people's leftovers, and he was right. Under the tin I found a string of pearls, cheap ones, with a clasp gone green, and a bow of red ribbon so crushed it looked like a moth. Someone had wound the pearls round the tube and tied the bow beneath it, the way a girl dresses a present she means to give away and then thinks better of. I never learned whose it was. The last owner had left in a hurry, and a hurry leaves things behind.

By the time we reached Teddington I had a plan for the thing. A woman selling trinkets from a pram on the towpath offered me four shillings for the lot. I said no, out loud, to nobody, and the swans turned their heads as if I'd been rude to them. Then I sat on the roof with the sun coming off the water in short bright strokes, the kind a child draws to say shiny, and I looked at those pearls for a long while.

In the end I threaded the ribbon back through the clasp, pressed the tin shut on its stripes, and wedged the whole arrangement on the shelf above the stove. Now, when the light comes low off the river, the bow catches it and throws a small spark across the galley ceiling, and I leave it there.