Traditional colour tattoo of a red Hawaiian shirt covered in palm fronds and woody station wagons, with black outlines and dark buttons, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red Hawaiian shirt with palm leaves and woody cars

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of a short-sleeved shirt with a repeating print of woody station wagons, green palm fronds and dark round buttons. The design uses heavy black outlines and flat, solid fills, with a red ground and accents of green, yellow, blue and brown. The shirt fills the frame on what appears to be a limb, with a small dark mark visible at the top right.

Traditional Other Car Button

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessa had the shirt folded in the glovebox before the wedding was even called off, which was how her Uncle Fitz knew she meant business. Red as a postbox, it smelled of coconut oil and somebody else's cigarettes. Every inch of it was printed with little brown estate cars, wood-panelled and roof-racked, marching in rows like a parade that had lost its band.

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They drove south out of Carlisle with the windows down and the radio hissing between stations. Fitz kept a row of palm-frond postcards tucked behind the sun visor, bought in a Bournemouth gift shop in 1971 and never once posted. At the Tebay services Dessa climbed out, shook the shirt open like a flag and buttoned it to the collar, one dark round button at a time, while a lorry driver leaned from his cab to whistle and then thought better of it.

'You look like a travel brochure left out in the rain,' Fitz said. 'That's the idea,' said Dessa. Bright things got waved at, she reckoned. Bright things got waved through barriers that would stop a plain grey man in his tracks.

By the time they reached Morecambe the little cars had faded at the seams and the sea smelled louder than the petrol. Dessa took the shirt off on the promenade, folded it along its old creases and laid it on the sea wall to dry. The gulls came down, considered the brown estates for a long moment, and left it alone.