Traditional flash design of a red rose and a blue rose above a banner reading there's no place like home, with red shoes and a star, shown on a plain background with no body placement.

Roses and ruby slippers banner flash

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A traditional-style flash drawing of a red rose and a blue rose with green leaves, overlapped by a curled banner reading "There's no place like home". Below, a pair of red shoes with blue legs and a yellow star with "CLICK! CLICK!" lines suggest a heel-clicking motif. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated fills of red, blue, green and yellow are set against a pale cream background.

Traditional Rose Banner Shoe Heel Star Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mojave gave me the same mile marker three times before the sun got serious. Cassidy's Diner sign, the one with the missing C, kept appearing on the left like a joke nobody else was in on. I had a full tank, a cooler of warm Cokes and a jar of my mother's rose-hip jam rolling about in the footwell, and in four hours I had not once been able to say where I was going.

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Dad used to say you could get anywhere on the old highway if you kept the needle on the white line. He never said what you did when the line ran out. I pulled onto the gravel shoulder and sat with the engine ticking, thinking about the red patent heels Nan kept wrapped in tissue paper in her hallway, and how she'd made me practise clicking them together on the lino. Click, click. Three times and you're somewhere that's yours. She swore it, and she was a woman who knew the difference between a fairy tale and a bus timetable.

So I did it. Heel to heel, like a fool in a cab, dust settling on the windscreen. Nothing happened except a dog barked somewhere off the road and a lorry hissed past, rocking the car. Then the flash drawing I'd tacked to the sun visor, the one with the two roses and the curled banner, caught the light, and the words across it looked less like a slogan and more like directions.

I turned the car around. Forty minutes later the porch light at Nan's was on, the lino cold under my socks, and the tissue paper was still in the hall drawer. I didn't click anything. I just stood on the mat and let the door close behind me.