Blue peace sign tattoo with a white dove and a small blue dove, ringed by black script lettering, on the side of the torso.

Peace sign and doves with quote on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A blue filled circle contains a white peace symbol and a white dove silhouette, with a smaller blue dove placed outside the circle at the upper right. Black script lettering follows the curve of the circle, forming a quotation around the motif. The solid blue ink contrasts with the black lettering and the pale skin, and the design sits centred on the side of the torso.

Ribs Peace symbol Dove Script Quote Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint is still tacky when Nell arrives with two flasks of tea and a torch clamped under her chin, and you tell her the circle sits too far left, and she tells you the shutter bows like a sail, so you're both wrong and the bus shelter hums on regardless. You have been mixing the same blue for three nights, a colour the council would call teal and Nell calls the sea at Margate in March.

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The sign goes on the roller shutter of the old wool shop on Tanner's Yard, the one whose owner left for Leeds and left a mannequin in the window wearing a grey cardigan. You chalk the curve first, a length of string pinned at the centre, then fill the circle and paint the white peace symbol with a brush you've had since art college. The words come last. Nell wrote them on a beer mat in the Crown: if you don't stand for something you will fall for anything. You letter them round the edge like a clock running backwards, one breath per word, and at the top you add the smaller dove, outside the ring, because Nell says every good rally needs a bird that has already got out.

At quarter to four a panda car noses round the corner and slows. The officer leans from the window and reads the lettering slowly, lips moving, the way people read menus in a language they half know. Who's paying for that, he asks. Nobody, you say. Then it's graffiti, he says, and Nell says it's a shop front, and he laughs for the first time and asks for the tea. He drinks it standing, says his nan had the quote on a tea towel, and drives off without writing anything down.

By six the shutter is dry, the doves are whiter than the sky, and the first bus pulls in and lights them up for the people waiting underneath.