Two photos of a traditional style tattoo of cartoon baby faces on an upper arm, one smiling with a lollipop and one crying with a pink bow and tear.

Smiling and crying cartoon baby faces on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The left photo shows a smiling cartoon baby face with a teal collar, a swirled lollipop and a small pink bow. The right photo shows the same face crying, with a pink bow on the head, a teal tear and a pink mouth. Bold black outlines and flat fills in pink, red, teal and green give the piece a classic cartoon look.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pellow Bay had one prize left on the Golden Hook stall that August, a china baby with a pink bow on its head and a swirled lollipop tied to its wrist. Dougie Marr swore it was the last of a set that had been sold off a travelling fair in 1931, and he swore it so often that Mrs Ivy Coake gave him six rolls of tickets just to make him stop. She carried it home along the prom like a christening candle, past the donkeys and the chip van, and set it on the counter of her sister's sweet shop beside the pear drops.

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The trouble was the back of the head. Ivy turned the china baby round to dust it and found a second face moulded there, all squeezed eyes and a wobbling mouth, with a single teal tear painted under one eye. Ivy's sister Maud said it was a factory mistake. Ivy said nothing of the kind, because every morning the baby faced the door with a grin, and every afternoon, when the takings came up short, someone had turned it round to the crying side without anyone admitting to touching it.

Dougie came back on the last Saturday of the season with a face like a wet Tuesday and asked for his prize back, on the grounds that his late uncle had built the Golden Hook with his own hands. Ivy looked at him over her glasses for a long time. Then she turned the baby slowly on the counter, smiling, crying, smiling again, until Dougie started to talk, and once he started he could not stop, and by closing time he had confessed to the cider, the rigged ducks and the pear drops he had been pinching for a decade.

He left with a paper bag of pear drops and no baby. The china child went back on the shelf facing the till, bow straight, lollipop swinging, and when the light came in off the sea it looked as pleased with itself as anything in Pellow Bay.

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