Black and grey realism tattoo of an older bearded man in a star-spangled top hat, with stripes behind him, on a limb against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Older man in star-spangled hat portrait

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed portrait of an older man with a beard, wearing a top hat decorated with stars, shown in profile and looking to the side. Fine shading gives the wrinkles, skin folds and hat brim strong three-dimensional form, and faint stripes sit behind the figure. The composition fills the frame with the portrait on a dark background, with the limb's curve visible at the edges.

Realism Other Portrait Beard Top hat Star Stripe Flag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hat came across the cloakroom counter at ten past nine, pushed at me by a Texan corporal who wanted it kept dry and out from under the jitterbugging. I hung it on the third peg, under a row of Land Army coats, and gave him a brass check stamped 37. He thanked me and took the stairs two at a time, humming something that was not quite the tune the band was playing.

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By eleven the Palais had turned to steam. Sweat ran down the windows, and Mr Ashby kept flapping his baton at the drummer like a man shooing a wasp. The corporal came back down for his coat at half past eleven with a girl from the Woolworths counter on his arm. He tapped the hat's brim with one finger, as if it were an old friend he was leaving behind. Then the lights dipped for the last waltz and he went out into the blackout without looking back.

I stood holding the check after they had gone. The hat stayed on its peg. It had a scorch along one star and a smell of Lucky Strikes and rain. Nobody came for it that night, or the next, or the week the notices went up about the American units moving down to the Channel coast.

Mr Ashby said I could keep it if I liked. I didn't want the hat. I wanted the man who wore it to come back and tell me what it felt like to be that lined and that certain of himself at thirty. Instead I put it on, just to see. The brim slid down over my eyes, the band struck up the last waltz again through the floorboards, and I didn't take it off until the lights came up.