Hand-drawn black ink flash sheet of thirteen numbered traditional-style designs, including a crescent moon, pipe, hourglass, flower, moth, flying saucer, jellyfish and the word thirteen in script.

Numbered black ink flash sheet of thirteen designs

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A photograph of a hand-drawn flash sheet on cream paper, with thirteen numbered designs in black ink. The subjects include a crescent moon, a smoking pipe, an hourglass, a flower, a moth, a flying saucer, a jellyfish, a headstone marked 13, a heart-shaped pointer and the word thirteen in script. The linework is bold and even, with some hatching and stippled shading, and the designs are spaced evenly across the sheet.

Traditional Crescent moon Pipe Lettering Hourglass Flower Moth Tree Flying saucer Jellyfish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the one who paints the numbers on the wagons, because nobody else in Halloran and Vane's will touch a thirteen. Vane insists the thirteenth wagon has been the lucky one for forty years, and you have never asked him what that luck looked like. The show is down to six wagons now, the elephants went to a Dutch zoo in the spring, and the big top is patched with feed sacks. Tonight the last crowd paid in buttons and half-crowns, and the hourglass on the ticket table is nearly run out.

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Mrs Tusk, the fortune teller, has been asking her planchette where the money went. It keeps spelling the same letter over and over, which she says is a thirteen with its top sheared off. Vane laughs around his pipe and blames the moon, which has been sitting low over the ploughed field since August. A light the colour of skimmed milk hangs above the field at night, and the lads swear a moth the size of a hand landed on the thirteenth wagon's roof and wouldn't leave.

At midnight you climb that wagon with a tin of white gloss, meaning to paint the number out so the next owner might have a clean start. The paint won't take. Each stroke dries into the same black thirteen, cut as clean as a headstone's lettering, and when you step back the wheels have sunk an inch into the mud as though they have stood there for a hundred years.

Below you, Vane is counting the takings aloud, and the hourglass on the table turns itself over. You pick up the brush again. Thirteen, you think, is the only number this show has left to sell.