Colour neo-traditional tattoo of an orange pill bottle with a grey lid and a banner reading STILL ILL, on the upper arm.

Pill bottle with STILL ILL banner

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of an orange pill bottle with a grey ridged lid, wrapped in a white banner that reads STILL ILL, with pills visible through the bottle. Bold dark outlines and smooth shading give the bottle and pills a rounded, dimensional look. Warm orange and grey dominate, with partial teal and grey tattoos visible at the edges of the frame.

Neo-trad Upper arm Banner Lettering

Find an artist for this

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

Old Tobias Quill kept his orange bottles in a tin trunk behind the caravan of the Dwindling Marvel, a travelling show that had sold its elephant to the knacker at Ely and its strongman to a pier theatre at Margate. Each evening, before the lamps were lit, he stood on an upturned crate and rattled a bottle at the crowd. Pills for the tired, pills for the lame, pills for a sweetheart who had gone off to London. The pills were sugar and chalk, and nobody in the Fens ever came back to complain.

Keep reading

His granddaughter Nell found the spare bottle one wet September. It had a ridged grey lid, a white paper band pasted round its belly, and the words STILL ILL painted across the band in the same red as the big top. She held it up to the lantern and asked why a cure should admit it had not worked. Tobias took the bottle from her and turned it slowly. "The banner is for the show," he said. "Not for the folk. The folk are always well enough to pay."

They played on through the autumn, to fewer and fewer villages. The clowns grew old, the ropes frayed, and the canvas took on the grey of the sky. One night the big top came down in a gust off the river, and by morning the only thing left standing was the wagon with the tin trunk. Nell sat on its step with the bottle in her lap and shook it. The pills rattled like a small bell.

A boy from the next parish came up the lane with his cap in his hands and asked whether the Marvel still had anything for his mother's cough. Nell looked at the bottle, then at the empty field, then at the boy. She poured him a handful of sugar and chalk, told him to take them with a cup of milk, and to come back if he felt no better. He did, and he did not, and he came back anyway, which is how the Marvel was kept on the road another winter.