Traditional style colour tattoo on the forearm showing a salmon nigiri piece, a yellow bird with a moustache and a pink banner reading SUSHI TIME, all outlined in black.

Salmon nigiri and bird with SUSHI TIME banner

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cartoon salmon nigiri sushi piece sits at the centre, with a yellow bird wearing a moustache and round eye beside it, both within a black-outlined wreath of shading. A pink banner across the bottom reads SUSHI TIME in black lettering. Bold black linework is filled with flat orange, pink, yellow and green ink, with soft grey-black shading behind the motifs.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Bird Banner Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have kept Mortimer for eleven years, and in that time the Great Pell Travelling Circus has shrunk from three rings to one, from a brass band to a man with a Bluetooth speaker. The elephant went to a field outside Chippenham. The trapeze was sold for scrap. What remains is a canvas tent patched like a tired quilt, a horsebox that coughs on hills, and a cockatoo with a waxed yellow moustache and one good eye, who rides a tricycle across the sawdust while the audience pretends the price of admission was worth it.

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Tonight Mr Pell comes to the caravan carrying a plastic tray of salmon nigiri from the services on the A350, the kind with a sticker on the lid and a sad little sprig of wasabi. He sets it on an upturned crate and says the bird needs feeding up before Sunday's matinee. He doesn't mean seed. You know what he means. The bank wants the caravan back by Friday, and Mortimer is the last thing in the Pell family that still sells tickets.

Mortimer ignores the rice and goes straight for the fish, pink and glistening under the bulb, tilting his head as if the orange stripes were a language he almost remembers. Then he hops onto the wooden block, counts to ten with his beak, and bows to nobody. You laugh despite yourself. Outside, the wind shakes the tent poles, and the old lettering on the tarpaulin, faded but still legible, says the same thing it always has.

On Sunday six people turn up, and one of them is a boy with a sticky face who sees the bird and shrieks, "It's the sushi one!" Mortimer climbs onto the tricycle, moustache twitching, and pedals out into the sawdust as though the whole tent were full.