Black tattoo of three tanks above the words 'We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane' on the outer thigh.

Tanks above a quote on the thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows three solid black silhouetted tanks in profile, with simple, bold shapes and little interior detail. Below them, a line of black serif text reads 'We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane', set in two lines. The image is in black ink only, with a close crop of skin at the left edge.

Thigh Vehicle Text Quote Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin tanks came to Edith Fenwick's bench in a shoebox on the first wet Tuesday of March, wrapped in a bath towel that smelled of a loft. Three of them, pressed steel, each no longer than a finger, their treads worn grey. The boy who brought them, Dennis from number nine, wanted them to fire again. His grandfather had carried them home from a war nobody in the street would name, and he said they had been quiet long enough.

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Edith turned them over under her lamp. The turrets were seized and the barrels bent like cold pasta. She could have straightened them with a pair of pliers and a steady hand. Instead she spent a week with a fine file, shaving the guns away until each tank was only a hull and a hatch. Dennis came every afternoon to ask when they would shoot. She told him they had done enough of that for one tin.

On the Saturday she asked what his grandfather used to do with his hands when he was tired. Dennis said he grew beans in a tyre by the back gate. So they packed the hulls with compost from the allotment bins and pushed in three seedlings, then set the tanks along the garden wall where the sun lay longest.

By July the runners had climbed the tracks and hung over the hatches like bunting, and the tanks looked as if something green and patient was carrying them away, slowly, one leaf at a time. Dennis picked the first pods himself and ate them standing up, and Edith kept the three filed-down barrels in a jam jar on the sill, where the light came through them.