Traditional style tattoo of cartoon Mickey Mouse steering a steamboat inside a bottle, with a red flower and green leaves, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Steamboat Mickey in a bottle on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey cartoon Mickey Mouse stands at the wheel of a steamboat with a smokestack, all shown inside a glass bottle with a metal stopper. A red flower with yellow centre and green leaves sits at the lower left of the design. Bold outlines and soft grey shading contrast with the flat red and green colour, and the design fills the frame against plain skin.

Traditional Thigh Mickey mouse Flower Wheel Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bottle has sat on the cabin shelf since the winter the ice took the towpath, and you have never once pulled the stopper. Your mother said a ship that small would sink the minute it was let out, so you left the cork where it was and polished the glass on Sundays with the hem of your coat. Inside, the paddle boat keeps its little black funnel puffing grey smoke at nobody, and the captain at the wheel never once looks round at you.

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Dez from the lock-keeper's cottage says the glass was blown on the cheap green stuff they used at Gainsborough, and that the boat was made by a man who drank his wages. You told him it was the best thing you owned. He laughed and said nothing on a river was ever the best thing, only the thing that floated longest. Then the Trent came up in March, and you learned he was wrong about that too, because the red flowers your nan grew in a tin on the step were the only thing left standing when the water went down.

On the last night of the flood you climbed onto the cabin roof with the bottle buttoned inside your coat. The current was dragging the Mabel Ann sideways against her rope, and you could hear her timbers groaning like a cow in a barn. You worked the stopper loose with cold fingers, tipped the bottle over the gunwale, and watched the little steamer slide out onto the black water, its wheel still turning as if someone aboard meant to steer it home.

The bottle sits empty on the shelf now. Every Sunday you still polish the glass, and you still look for the captain, and some weeks you swear he has finally turned his head.