Colour tattoo on a person's upper back showing a grey spaceship, a pink, green and yellow spiral, pink flowers and the words I AIM TO MISBEHAVE.

Spaceship and spiral on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey, detailed spaceship angled across the lower half of the design, with pink blossom-like flowers scattered around it. Behind the ship is a large spiral in pink, green and yellow, and the phrase I AIM TO MISBEHAVE is written in small black capitals below. The linework is bold and clean with flat, smooth colour fills, and the composition sits centrally across the upper back.

Back Spaceship Spiral Flower Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tam,

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The cherry tree by the back wall came into blossom the same week your postcard did, which I took as a sign, though Mum says I take everything as a sign. The petals have been coming down all afternoon and I've been sweeping them off the path into the spiral bed you wanted dug before you left. Twelve rings of pink, green and yellow lettuce and sorrel, exactly as you drew them on the back of the seed catalogue. Mrs Okafor next door says it looks like a snail that has been to finishing school.

Your card came from a place called Kerrow Junction with a picture of a ship on the front that looked nothing like the one you described. Hull all dents, you wrote, and a captain who keeps a hat she only wears to shout at people. Under your name you'd written I aim to misbehave, underlined twice, the way you used to sign your school reports when Dad wasn't looking. I laughed out loud in the post office. The postmistress asked if I wanted to send something back, so here I am.

The news: the shed roof came off in the gale and landed in the neighbour's pond, which the ducks have decided is theirs now. I've started on the cold frame. I have not started the letter to the council about the hedge, because you always did that bit better, all capitals and no manners.

What I keep thinking about is the spiral. You said if you dug it right, the rainwater would run in and out of it like a tide and nothing would ever drown. I've tried it, and I'm not sure it works. But every morning the bed is a little more itself, and this morning a sorrel leaf had turned the exact yellow of the lamp rims in your drawing. So I'm saving you the seed. Come home and tell me where you've been misbehaving, and I'll show you what I did with the garden while you were gone.

Love, Nell