Two matching pink flamingo tattoos on the tops of bare feet, each with a grey banner, reading CREATE on the left foot and OR DIE on the right, in a bold neo-trad style.

Matching flamingo tattoos on both feet

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

Two matching pink flamingos are tattooed on the tops of a pair of bare feet, each with a grey ribbon banner below it. The left banner reads CREATE and the right reads OR DIE, both in black block lettering. Bold black outlines define the birds, with pink shading and loose teal and green splashes behind them, and the two designs are mirrored in composition.

Neo-trad Other Flamingo Banner Ribbon Bird Lettering Matching pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara Venn had lettered shop fronts along the Kent coast for thirty-one years and had never once been asked to paint a bird. So when Ruth from the pier kiosk brought her a beer mat with two pink flamingos sketched on it, Mara assumed it was a joke about her rates. Ruth wasn't laughing. Her husband had kept a pair at the boating lake until the council moved them on, and she wanted them on the wall of her new café, one facing left, one facing right, so they could keep an eye on each other.

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Mara took the job for the ribbons. Scrolled banners were the part she loved most, the grey shadow curling under each end like a sheet that has just been dropped. She painted the left bird first, neck bent into a question mark, teal splashes flicked behind it with a stiff brush. CREATE went under it in the block capitals her father had taught her on the side of the family van, one letter a morning while the tide went out and came back.

The right bird took longer. Ruth stood at her elbow with a cup of tea going cold and said the second phrase had been her husband's, painted on the boathouse door as a joke about the crossword. Mara had doubts and said so. Ruth said he would have thought it hilarious, and that the birds were the joke really, because flamingos only stand on one leg by accident, when they've got tired of the other.

When the paint dried, the green splash behind the second bird caught the early light, and Ruth tapped the café window where the two birds sat reflected over the pier railings. "Now they've got something to argue about," she said. Mara packed her brushes and didn't mention that, in the glass, the pair looked exactly like they had always been in a hurry to agree.