Neo-trad style flash design of a red-haired cartoon girl surfing a turquoise wave beneath pink flowers and a ribbon banner with lettering, with no body placement shown.

Surfing girl with wave and flowers

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A cartoon girl with long flowing red hair and a pink flower in her hair rides a surfboard on a large teal wave. Pink poppy-style flowers sit at the top, two fish swim in the wave, and a ribbon banner with lettering and pink flowers sits across the bottom. Bold outlines, flat colour fills and white foam highlights give it a bright, illustrative finish.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the damp gets into old bones faster than young ones. No, I will not tell the one about the eel. Tonight it is the girl with the red hair, who rode the Great Green Curl off Porthmerrow three hundred winters ago, when the sea still had manners and the town still had a name.

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Her hair was the colour of rust on a gate, and it streamed behind her like a flag nobody had told to stop. A pink flower sat above one ear, and two silver fish swam the lip of the wave beside her, never once getting wet, the way fish do when they have decided someone is worth watching.

Her board had red and white stripes on its belly, like a barber's pole that had gone to sea. Her grandmother painted them, and painted the words along the ribbon as well: SURFING BRETT PARADISE. Nobody living can tell you what a Brett was, or whether it was a place or a man who lost a bet.

The wave was taller than the church and taller than the lighthouse, which had already gone under. Everyone on the shingle held their breath. She did not. She leaned, the foam rose white as a wedding veil, and she rode it all the way in to the old slipway, stepped off, shook out her hair and asked whoever was watching if they had a towel.

That is the whole of it. The sea took the church the winter after, and the lighthouse, and the slipway, and the fish went wherever fish go. But every spring the tide creeps a little higher, and I like to think she is still out there, riding it, asking for a towel.

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