Black ink flash drawing of a cartoon penguin in a bow tie, framed by flowers and two banners reading It Ain't Easy and Been Wheezy, in a traditional style.

Penguin with banners flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink sketch of a cartoon penguin wearing a bow tie, with a worried expression and dashed shading lines across its body. Two scrolling banners carry lettering above and below it, with two flowers and a leaf shape on either side. Faint sketches of other characters sit at the top of the page, and the drawing is in black line only with no colour.

Traditional Penguin Bow tie Flower Banner Lettering Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the urn, love, and mind the draught from the back door, because this is a long one and Mrs Pardoe never let a guest leave before the end. Back in the summer of the big storm there was a penguin working the breakfast room at Sea View, the only waiter in the town with a proper bow tie and a silver tray. Everybody said Pemberton had come up from the south on a coal boat, and he never once corrected them.

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He was a good waiter, mind. He could carry four rounds of toast and a pot of tea down the stairs without a drop going over the rim. But he had a face on him that never quite settled, and the guests took it personal. The retired colonel said the bird looked like his pension was late. The two sisters from Leeds wanted to know if he was poorly. Pemberton only told them the same thing every morning, that it ain't easy, and then he'd go back to the kitchen with his flippers tucked behind his back, wheezing like a pier gate in a gale.

Then the pier band struck up on the last night of August and the whole house went down to dance, and nobody saw the penguin climb out onto the roof gutter with a bucket of sand and a tin of paint. Come morning he was sitting on the chimney stack with his tray balanced on his knees, and the banner he'd painted along the slates said been wheezy, and I'm still here, which Mrs Pardoe read out loud from the yard before she'd let herself cry about it.

She kept the sign up for years. Some say it's still there under the paint, if you know where to look on a wet afternoon. Now, who wants the last of the biscuits?