Man in profile with roses and banner flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold illustrated design of a man in left-facing profile holding a small vial near his face, framed by a teal lantern-like top, a gas mask and curling scroll shapes. Two cream banners carry lettering, with JUST THIS ONCE above and EVERYBODY LIVES below, and red roses cluster around the lower and right edges. Thick dark outlines and shaded browns, reds and teal give it a classic tattoo flash look against a dark brown background.

Traditional Man Profile Rose Banner Lettering Scroll Lantern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gas mask is still in its tin when the fog rolls up off the river, and you are already late. Mrs Okafor's boy has been coughing since Tuesday, and the chemist on Lantern Row has three vials left of the serum that works. You take the tin from under the counter, check the rubber seal the way your father taught you, and slide a vial into your breast pocket, where it sits cold against your ribs like a second heartbeat.

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Gaslight stutters along Pell Street. Somebody has hung a wreath of red roses on the railings outside the church, and the petals have already gone brown at the edges. A tram bell rings twice in the murk, then stops. You count the doors by feel until you reach the one with the blue chalk mark, and you knock the way you were taught, three short and one long, as if you do not expect anyone to be awake.

Mrs Okafor answers before the second knock. Her face is grey with lack of sleep, but the boy is sitting up in bed with a comic held under the blanket and a torch in his teeth. The fever broke at midnight, she says, all on its own, and she cannot decide whether to be relieved or furious. You stand in the doorway with your hand resting on your pocket. Then you tell her to keep the vial for the next one, because there is always a next one, and you turn back into the fog before she can thank you.

On the walk home the lamps seem brighter. The wreath has a card pinned to it now, written in careful capitals: NOT TONIGHT. You did not pin it. You take the card, fold it into your pocket beside the empty tin, and go the long way past the lantern on the chemist's roof, its glass still glowing for nobody in particular.