Colour tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder showing pink flowers, green leaves, a Made in Oregon sign, a Bend badge and a neon Rogue sign, in a bold neo-traditional style.

Oregon signs and pink flowers on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with pink flowers and green leaves framing a cluster of Oregon themed motifs. These include a Made in Oregon state outline, a Bend badge, a vertical neon Rogue sign and a small Crater Lake style roundel, with a partly visible banner above. The linework is bold and outlined, with flat colour and soft shading in the greens, pinks and purples.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Flower Leaves State outline Banner Badge

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time we reached Bend the van had developed a rattle that Dad swore was the spare wheel and Mum insisted was the cheap sweets rolling about in the glovebox. Ivy had the atlas open across her knees and kept reading out place names like a bingo caller: Sisters, Redmond, Gilchrist, which nobody could say without giggling. We'd been driving through pink rhododendron for an hour, and the sun kept catching the chrome on every filling station like someone was signalling us.

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In the car park of a diner called the Tallow Hotel, a vertical neon sign stood against the afternoon, half its tubes dead. Mum stopped to stare at it with her hand over her eyes. She said her own father had painted signs like that in a shed behind the church, and that he'd once been paid in a bag of pears and a promise that nobody would ever read the lettering he'd got wrong. Dad laughed so hard he had to sit on the bumper.

We didn't see Crater Lake that day. We got as far as a roadside stall selling enamel badges, and Mum bought one shaped like a small blue circle with a mountain in it, then pinned it to her cardigan without a word. Ivy wanted one that said Bend. Dad bought her two.

When we got home, the badge was still on Mum's cardigan, and the rattle was still in the van. Nobody ever fixed either of them.