Small black dotwork tattoo of a peeled banana on the side of the torso, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Peeled banana on the side of the body

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a partly peeled banana, with its skin curled back at the top and right. The outline and shading are built from fine stippled dots, giving the fruit a textured, soft appearance. It is shown in black and grey against plain skin, with the design centred in the frame.

Dotwork Ribs Fruit

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down and mind the cat, because this is the story of the Saturday the Harcourt boy carried a banana up Crane Street in his cap. Nobody in Milford Bridge had set eyes on one since the war. Old Ivor Pell, the grocer, had kept his last crate in the back under a tarpaulin like a dead man's coat, and nobody thought it would ever be shifted. Then a lorry came in from Bristol with eleven crates, and the whole town went round to the back of the shop as if someone had rung the chapel bell.

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Young Dennis Harcourt was seven and had been promised one for knowing all his psalms. He stood on the step with his coppers sweating in his fist, and when Ivor peeled the fruit for him the skin came away in three neat tongues, curled back like petals that had decided to become a boat. He ate it in tiny bites while the queue watched his face, not one of them speaking. His mother said afterwards that he didn't open his mouth again until teatime.

That night he sat under the kitchen lamp and tried to draw the thing on the back page of his exercise book. He got it wrong four times. The pencil made it look like a bread roll, so in the end he pressed the point of a pin into the paper and let the dots do the shading, soft and speckled, the way the light had lain on the peel. His father, who worked the coal round and had not said ten words since Dunkirk, took the book from the table and studied it a long time.

He folded it once and put it in his breast pocket. It was still there when they buried him forty years on, and the lining smelled faintly of paraffin and oranges. So when you see that little dotted banana, curled and modest, you'll know it isn't just fruit. It's the morning the whole of Milford Bridge came out to watch one boy eat his first banana, and not one of them laughed.