Two people's forearms side by side showing matching traditional-style tattoos of a shovel and a shaded object, each with a scroll banner carrying lettering, on the inner forearm.

Matching shovel and banner forearm tattoos

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a tattoo of a tool-like object with a scroll banner across it. The left shows a shovel with grey shading and lettering reading as a phrase about a girl in a garden, and the right shows a shaded cylindrical object in orange and red tones with a banner of lettering. The linework is bold with grey shading, with red splashes around both designs and a little colour in the right-hand piece, and the two arms are held together at the wrists.

Traditional Forearm Banner Lettering Matching tattoo Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spade had leaned against the coal bunker since the summer Mrs Ostler took the lodgers' deposits and went off to Benidorm with a man called Clive, and Dot said that made it ours, the way the bent gate and the damp front room were ours. We dug the first hole on the Monday after the storm, when the sea had come over the sea wall and left a crust of weed across the lawn like a badly fitted wig.

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We were looking for the tin. Everyone at Saltcombe Lodge knew about the tin. Mrs Ostler had once told Room Four that she'd buried her savings in the back garden under a nice bit of rhubarb, and Wilf, who had lived in Room Four since the miners' strike and believed everything he was told, had spent three summers prodding the lawn with a fork. Dot reckoned Wilf had got the wrong rhubarb. I reckoned she was just tired of him asking.

At about four o'clock the spade rang on something that wasn't a stone. It was a biscuit tin, painted with a faded peanut, its lid rusted shut. Inside, under a paper bag gone soft as bread, was no money at all, only a dozen salted peanuts in their shells and a letter in careful copperplate that began, Dear girls, you were never going to find it in the garden.

Dot laughed until she had to sit down on the wet grass. I didn't. I kept reading the letter over her shoulder while the tide came in past the groyne, and I thought about how long Mrs Ostler must have been planning to leave. We shared the peanuts on the back step, rain running off our wrists where the mud met, and we ate them the way you'd eat anything you'd been promised and never expected to get.