A red ornate frame holds a Tattoo Bar sign above scattered temporary tattoo designs in script lettering, a silhouette and a peacock on a yellow surface.

Tattoo Bar sign with temporary tattoo designs

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

A red ornate picture frame holds a white sign reading Tattoo Bar in pink script with gold flourished scrollwork above and below. Below the frame, many small printed temporary tattoo cards are scattered on a yellow surface, showing script lettering, a profile silhouette, a peacock feather and other illustrated motifs. The composition is a top-down view with the frame in the upper half and the cards spilling across the lower half, with colours in pink, teal, gold and red.

Lettering Sign Frame Temporary tattoo Script Silhouette Peacock Flourish Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Saltern Market could remember the sign-painter's real name, only that she kept a red ornate frame on the post by the fish stalls and hung it straight every Saturday. Under the glass were the words Tattoo Bar in pink script, with gold scrollwork curling above and below like vines that had been told to keep their distance. Beneath the frame she spread her cards across a yellow cloth, each one a small picture for the skin: a copper-coloured peacock feather, a profile cut from dark paper, a bit of looping lettering that nobody could read but everybody wanted.

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A boy called Coll came one wet morning with two coins and a scab on his knuckle, asking for something that would stay. The sign-painter shook her head and handed him a card with a teal moon on it. 'Wet the back, press it firm, count to thirty slowly,' she said. 'It stays as long as you need it to, and not a day after.' He pressed the feather to his wrist and counted until the rain stopped and the gulls had gone quiet over the harbour wall.

The feather stayed through the winter and the spring. Coll carried fish boxes, learned his letters, and forgot how he had got the ache out of his knuckle. When he finally went to wash the mark off one evening, the ink did not budge, and he understood that he no longer needed it to stand in for anything. He peeled it away in one piece and left it on the cloth for the next child who came asking.

Years later he brought a daughter to the market with the same two coins and the same bruised look. The frame still hung on the post, though the stall was his now. He lifted a card from the pile, found a silhouette with her hair pinned up, and pressed it gently to the girl's wrist. 'Hold for thirty,' he said, and then, because she was watching his face, he counted out loud.