Colour tattoo of a red-hatted garden gnome with a white beard and blue jacket, holding a brown case, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red-hatted garden gnome on a lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

A full-body garden gnome stands centre frame, wearing a tall red pointed hat, a white beard, a blue jacket and brown boots, and holding a brown rectangular case at its side. The linework is clean, with soft painterly shading on the face, jacket and hat that gives the figure volume. Warm reds, blues and browns dominate against the pale skin, with faint partial tattoos visible at the left and right edges of the frame.

Calf Hat Beard Boot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gnome had carried the case under his arm since the spring the lane flooded, and he would not put it down for the reunion either. Mrs Abernethy at the village hall took one look at him by the coat pegs and said gnomes were not on the list, but the list had been typed in 1979 and nobody had thought to update it.

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Inside the case, folded in tissue, were the things he had been given at Holgate Primary: a ruler with a chipped corner, a register of birthdays, and a tin of coloured pencils worn down to stubs. Each of the forty-one children had once been asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, and each had written the answer on a card. The gnome had kept every card. He opened the case on a trestle table between the squash and the sausage rolls and began to read them aloud, one after another, the way his grandmother said a thing should be told, without hurrying and without adding to it.

A man called Dennis, who had written fireman in careful capitals, stood up when his card was read and said he had been one for thirty years and had never once been asked whether he was happy. A woman who had wanted to be a nurse cried into a paper napkin. The gnome did not cry, being made of clay and paint, but when the last card was read he found the case was heavier than when he had lifted it.

In the morning the hall was empty. The case sat on the trestle table with its lid open, and every card had been put back in its place, each with a line added in pencil beneath the original answer. Under Dennis's fireman there was now a second word, and it was not fireman.