Small red and black Poke Ball tattoo with soft shading, placed behind the ear on the side of the head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poke Ball tattoo behind the ear

Other · Colour · Photo

A small Poke Ball tattoo sits behind a visible ear, with the top half in red and the bottom half in white, divided by a black band with a central button. The design has bold black outlines and smooth grey shading that gives the red dome a rounded, glossy look. The tattoo is centred in the frame with dark hair on the left and the ear on the right, against a plain background.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sniffer dog has lost interest in your rucksack by the time you reach the desk at Holyhead, but the officer with the grey crew cut has not. He turns a small red and white ball over in his gloved palm the way a jeweller weighs a stone, thumb hovering above the black band in the middle. "Anything to declare?" he asks. "Only that it isn't really mine to declare."

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He presses the button. The ball gives a dry click and splits along its equator, and inside, folded so often the paper has gone soft as cloth, is a ferry ticket dated the summer of 1998 and a photograph of two boys squinting from a harbour wall. The officer unfolds the paper, reads the back, and his eyebrows climb. He has the grace not to read it aloud.

The note is in biro, in capitals: IF YOU'RE READING THIS YOU FINALLY CAME BACK. CHIPS ARE ON ME. Your brother wrote it the week you left, before either of you knew how long the silence would last, and hid it in the one thing he knew you'd never throw away, the ball you used to hurl against the garage door until the paint cracked.

The officer hands back the ball, then the note, then, after a pause, the rucksack. "Go on," he says gruffly. "Chips are on me, mind, wherever you're headed." You close your fist around the warm plastic and walk out into the wind, which smells of diesel and salt and, faintly, of vinegar.