Traditional style tattoo on a lower leg of a blue and black striped dress with the words WHITE AND GOLD? above and below it.

Striped dress with WHITE AND GOLD? lettering

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A bold, outlined tattoo of a sleeveless dress in blue and black horizontal stripes, with the words WHITE AND GOLD? set above and below it in block capitals. The flat, solid fills and thick black outlines give it a classic traditional look, and the dress is centred on the skin. A partial tattoo in orange and red appears at the bottom edge of the frame.

Traditional Calf Dress Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, Tilly, and put that kettle on the back ring, for you've asked me the same question four times since Harrow Lock, and I'll answer it properly this time. The dress on Mother Abney's line, flapping like a flag over the lock cottage. Ezra Pell swore it was black and blue, the colour of a mackerel's back. Dunstan Pell swore on their dead father's pipe it was white and gold, like barley standing in the sun.

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Neither would give ground. Ezra ate his tea on the cabin roof for a week over it, and Dunstan started calling his brother a blind mule at every lock between here and Tollbury. They wagered a full sack of Welsh coal, the better part of a winter's warmth, and marched up the towpath at dusk to have Mrs Abney settle it. She stood at her gate with a peg in her mouth and looked at the dress a long while, then at the two of them, then at the sky going pale over the water.

'It's both, you great pair of mules,' she said round the peg. 'Black and blue when the light comes off the towpath, white and gold when it comes down from the sky. It's always been the one dress. Your eyes just keep choosing.' Dunstan said that was a cheat. Ezra said it was the most sensible thing he'd heard all year. Neither of them paid the coal.

Mother Abney unpegged the dress and folded it over her arm, and the cloth went from one colour to the other in her hands as she walked back up the path. The brothers stood at the gate a long time after, arguing over the colour of the gravel.