Traditional style colour tattoo of a poison bottle with a skull and crossbones, a 'Life is Poison' banner and a flower, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poison bottle and banner on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo shows a poison bottle with a skull and crossbones on its label, wrapped by a scroll banner reading 'LIFE IS POISON'. A grey-blue and yellow flower with a red centre sits behind the bottle, and a red ribbon trails from the neck of the bottle. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat fills in red, green, yellow and grey on a plain skin background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you go lifting that bottle off the windowsill, Dilys Jenkin, not while the pit whistle's still wailing. Your father carried it up from the lamp room the week the Pritchard boy didn't come home, and nobody in this row has said a word about it since.

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It came from Mr Ambrose Vane, a tonic man who rattled up the valley every spring in a yellow cart with a flower painted on its side. He sold green drops for coughs, for teething babies and for men whose chests went tight in the damp, and he tied a red ribbon round the neck of every bottle like a ha'penny sweet. Nobody read the label. The skull was too handsome to be taken seriously, and most of us couldn't read the scroll anyway.

But Dilys could, and that winter she sat by the fire and spelt it out aloud, slow as a hymn. LIFE IS POISON. Her gran heard her and laughed till she coughed, then said Vane had told her the very same thing at the door. Everything is poison, missus, he'd said, tipping his hat. The trick is knowing the dose. Then he took her shilling and drove off towards Merthyr with his cart creaking under his tins.

So the bottle stays on the sill with its cork gone green and the ribbon faded to the colour of a robin's chest. Mind what you swallow, my bird, and mind what you believe, because somebody always comes up the valley with a pretty painted cart and a dose that's just a little too clever.

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