Black ink flash design reading One for the road, surrounded by feathers, a kookaburra, a moon, a sun, wattle, a fish, a bottle, an eye and animal skulls, drawn in fine line with stippled shading.

One for the road tattoo flash design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing arranged in a loose circle around the words One for the road in bold blackletter-style capitals. The motifs include feathers, a kookaburra on a branch, a crescent moon with stars and a planet, a rising sun, a cloud with rain, wattle sprigs, a fish, a bottle, an eye, a hand and two animal skulls. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled dots and solid black fills on the feathers and hand, set on a plain cream background.

Botanical Lettering Feather Moon Star Planet Sun Cloud Rain Fish Bottle Eye Hand Skull Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kookaburra had been laughing at the dry creek since breakfast, and Nell Varley took it personally. Her father had left her the stock route and one bottle of rum wrapped in a wet towel, and she was saving the bottle for the day the cloud over the ridge finally let go. For three weeks it had gathered and thickened and given nothing but a grey smell and a pale sun that rose and set like a coin nobody wanted.

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Sol Hebbard came up the track at dusk with forty head of thin cattle and a face like a dried-out saddle. He had walked this country for forty years and he did not ask for water. He asked for the bottle. Nell pulled the cork with her teeth and handed it over, and he held it up to the last of the light, where the moon was already climbing above the wattle and the sun was sliding down behind the far hills, both of them in the sky at once.

"One for the road," Sol said, and drank, and passed it back. "Which road?" Nell asked. He only pointed at the sky with the bottle, then at the fence where a cow skull sat bleached on a post, its eye sockets full of blue dusk.

The rain came in the small hours, not on them but on the country to the east, a grey roar they heard without seeing. By morning the creek was running brown and the kookaburra was laughing at nothing at all. Nell set the empty bottle on the fence beside the skull, a single black feather caught under its neck, so whoever came up the track next would know someone had been there before them.