Mid-century starburst and atomic flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

The sheet holds many separate black motifs on a cream background, including multi-point starbursts, sparkles, diamond shapes, interlocking rounded rectangles, fish, flowers and boomerang shapes. The motifs use solid black fills alongside thin outline linework, arranged in loose columns down the page. Everything is black on cream, with no colour ink.

Starburst Sparkle Diamond Fish Flower Rectangle Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold that ladder steady, Ray, or you'll be scraping yourself off the promenade with the gulls' leftovers. Yes, that end. Mind the paint pot. Mr Culley has been on at me for three days about this starburst, and he wants it blinking over the Starlite doors before the whole of Scarborough comes up the steps on Saturday.

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Every shape on the bench had come out of his sketchbook, which he'd bought in Leeds for a shilling and filled with the future. Sparkles like frost on a bus window. Diamonds with a cross-hatched heart. Rectangles stacked like sugar cubes, and a flat boomerang that looked like a kidney somebody had dropped in a puddle. Ray thought the fish were daft. I thought they were the best of the lot, three of them nosing along the edge of the sheet as if they had somewhere better to be.

The tube is the hard part. You lay the glass across the bench, warm it in the blue flame until it goes soft and gold, then bend it round your knee and pray your breath holds. Ray's first point came out like a cat's tail. My second went on wrong, too many arms, so the thing looked like the sun had had a fit. Mr Culley came down from the office, squinted at it for a long minute, and said leave it. Nobody comes to a ballroom to check the arithmetic, he said. They come for the fizz.

Saturday night we switched it on from the back room. The first arm flickered, then another, and then the whole crooked star shuddered alight over the doors, pink and then white, throwing its uneven spikes across the wet pavement. People stopped in the road to look up. By ten o'clock the lopsided one was the only thing anybody in Scarborough could see.