Colourful spade-shaped tattoo on a calf showing a UFO beaming orange light over black pine trees against a purple and pink sky, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spade with UFO and pine trees on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a spade symbol filled with a night sky of purple, pink and teal, with a flying saucer emitting an orange beam above two black pine tree silhouettes. Bold black outlines and streaks of light define the shapes, while the colour inside the spade is softly blended. The design sits centrally on the outer calf against smooth skin.

Neo-trad Calf Spade Ufo Flying saucer Pine tree Night sky Galaxy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessert was being served when Gary Pollard produced the pack of cards from his inside jacket pocket, the same pack he'd been nicking from his dad's sideboard since the fourth year, and fanned them across the table at the Lockhart Arms as if he was still in the back row of Geography.

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"Spades," he said. "Loser buys the next round and tells the truth about the hayfield."

Nobody had forgotten the hayfield. Three of us had walked out past the Hallett farm the summer before our exams to watch for the lights everyone swore came down over Cold Harbour Wood, and we'd lain on a bale for four hours with a torch that kept cutting out. Nothing came. Carol Ansell cried on the bus home because she'd wanted something to happen to someone.

Gary dealt. I held the ace and thought about that sky, the particular purple it went after the clocks changed, the pines black against it like cutouts. He lost the first trick on purpose, I think, because when the saucer finally came up in his voice, it came out as a joke. "I saw it," he said. "Wasn't a joke. Orange light straight down on the trees. Dad was in the car and said nothing, and I've been saying nothing ever since."

Carol laughed. I didn't. I laid the ace on the table and the wood creaked under it, and for a second the whole room seemed to tilt towards the window, where the car park lamps had turned the glass a faint, dirty violet.