Pencil sketch of a neo-traditional tattoo flash design showing a portrait with a lightning bolt across the face, sparkles and a banner with the words ZIGGY PLAYED GUITAR.

Portrait with lightning bolt and banner design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A graphite pencil sketch of a tattoo design shows a stylised portrait of a face with swept-back hair and a lightning bolt stripe across one eye, framed by four-pointed sparkles. A ribbon banner across the bottom reads ZIGGY PLAYED GUITAR in block capitals. Shading uses fine hatched pencil lines, with red-orange pencil accents on the banner, lightning bolt and hair.

Neo-trad Portrait Lightning bolt Sparkle Banner Lettering Hair Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lad in the back row had painted a lightning bolt across his left eye with his mum's blue eyeshadow, and nobody at the Palais had the heart to tell him it ran the wrong way. Dennis Hollis had run the sound desk there for thirty-one years and had watched a hundred hopefuls scrape across that stage in borrowed jackets. He reckoned this one would last a fortnight. The boy said his name was Ziggy, that his real name was Carl, and that he didn't want to hear either of them again until he'd been paid.

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They called themselves the Glitter Bolts, which Dennis thought a rubbish name, and by the second week the banner over the drum riser said ZIGGY PLAYED GUITAR in letters Carl had cut from a yellow bedsheet with his nan's dressmaking shears. The lettering went wonky on the Y and nobody cared. The typing pool came for the eyeliner and stayed for the cheap three-string guitar from a jumble sale, which he played like it owed him money.

Then the van gave out on the Winwick road in November, and the rest of the band walked off into the rain to find a phone. Carl sat on the kerb under the bedsheet with the guitar across his knees, and when a lorry driver pulled up to ask if he was all right, Carl played him three songs he'd made up in the dark. The driver tipped his cap and drove on. Dennis found him there an hour later, still playing to the wet road.

Years after, when the Palais had become a bingo hall, Dennis kept that guitar in the cupboard under the stage. The blue bolt had worn off the body, leaving bare wood where a boy had once drawn the lightning, and the banner was still folded in the case, yellow and soft as a tea towel.