Colour traditional tattoo of red glitter ruby slippers and a silver star on an upper arm, with a banner above.

Red glitter ruby slippers on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pair of red glitter shoes with blue shaded heels and a glittering silver star sit on a bold outlined background of stars and sparkles. Solid black outlines and smooth colour fills contrast with the speckled glitter effect on the shoes. Partial lettering on a banner above and a swirl below frame the design, and the image is a close, straight-on view of the arm.

Traditional Upper arm Shoe Star Sparkle Banner Lettering Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Three weeks out from Valparaiso, the bosun found the shoes wedged in the scupper behind the galley, and nobody aboard would say whose they were. Red as a pillar box, sequined all over, so they caught the lamplight like someone had spilled glitter across the planks. He held them up by the heels and asked if they were for the cook's wife. I took them off him before he could toss them, because a man who throws away something that shines is a man who has stopped looking at the sea.

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Cook swore they'd come off a Liverpool steamer fitted out for a music hall tour, and the mate said that was rubbish. I kept them in my kitbag, wrapped in a spare oilskin, and each night before the watch I'd turn them over under the binnacle lamp, trying to work out who would walk down a gangplank in shoes like that. Someone who expected to get somewhere, I reckoned. Someone who didn't care what the docks thought of their ankles.

We lost the foremast topsail off the Horn in a squall that came out of nowhere at four bells. In the chaos I went up the ratlines with the rest of them, and when I came down, soaked and shaking, the shoes were still in my kitbag, dry as a biscuit. I think that was the moment the crew stopped calling them bad luck and started calling them the Captain's mascot, though the Captain never once mentioned them.

We docked at Avonmouth in April. I carried the shoes up the terrace on Ashley Road and set them on the windowsill, where the streetlight caught the silver star stitched on one toe. Before going to bed I clicked my heels together three times, feeling a fool, and waited for the house to change. It didn't. But the kettle was warm and my mother was snoring through the wall, and that was enough to make me sleep.