Several pigs lie together in a pen, their pink skin covered in faded colour tattoos including a monogram pattern, cherry blossoms, skulls and a checkered flag.

Tattooed pigs resting on a concrete floor

Other · Mixed · Photo

Several pigs lie close together on a concrete floor, their pale pink skin covered in tattoos. The designs include a repeated monogram-style pattern, cherry blossom flowers, skulls, a checkered flag, script lettering and a few small stars. The linework is mostly soft and blurred with age, and the ink mixes faded pink, green and blue with darker greys.

Other Pig Tattoo Monogram Cherry blossom Flower Skull Script Star Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessie Quarles bought the flash sheet from a dead man's widow in Grimsby for the price of a fish supper, and by the Tuesday he regretted every penny. It was a jumble: cherry blossom, a checkered flag, a grinning skull in a bowler hat, three stars, an anchor the colour of weak tea, and a monogram pattern someone had copied by hand from a handbag. Nobody at the shop wanted to ink it. The pinks had gone thin in the bottles that spring, and the liners were blunt.

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Morag Pell, who ran the back room at the Gull and Anchor and sold more eggs than tattoos, said she would take it off his hands if he threw in a sack of layers' pellets. They shook on it. She spent three nights at her kitchen table with a pot of coffee and a roll of acetate, tracing each design, and by the third night she had stopped seeing nonsense. She saw a route through it: the flag for the lorry driver who never came home, the blossom for the girl who married the harbourmaster's son, the stars for every night the pair of them stayed out past the last bus.

She ran the sheet through the machine in the order the designs had come off the page, which meant the skull ended up beside the monogram and the anchor sat under a sprig of blossom, and nobody could say it made sense. Dessie came round on the Friday to complain, looked at the result, and went quiet for so long that she thought he'd fainted.

When the lorry-driver's widow came to collect the sheet a month later, she turned it over in her hands and laughed until she had to sit down. "He always said he'd end up with a bit of everything," she said. Morag wrapped it in waxed paper and didn't mention the pig farm up the coast that had been asking for a commission of its own.