Three paper tattoo flash designs in traditional style: a teacup with a wave and flowers, a small aeroplane, and a dagger-like syringe, each with a text banner.

Teacup, aeroplane and syringe flash stickers

Traditional · Colour · Flash

Three separate cut-out paper designs sit on a pale surface: a teacup on a saucer with a blue wave and flowers, a single-engine aeroplane, and a syringe with flowers. Each has a bold black outline with flat colour fills, and text is set on ribbon banners. The designs are spread across the frame with plain background showing between them.

Traditional Teacup Wave Flower Aeroplane Banner Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruett had been painting banners on the Margate front for thirty-one years, and she still wrote her lettering backwards on the glass before turning it round, the way her father had taught her. The sheet on the cracked windowsill held three designs she had drawn for her nephew Dean, who had talked his way onto a stool at the back of the shop. The teacup was his idea. The little single-engine plane was hers, a thing she had watched from the pier one August, banking low over the tide with its wheels down like a heron.

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Dean wanted the syringe because he said it looked like a dagger that had given up. Mrs Pruett told him a banner was for words, and words wanted room. He squeezed the last line into capitals so big the final word had to bend round the flowers. They argued all afternoon about whether so bad was a phrase or a cry for help. He lost. He always lost to her about lettering and won about everything else.

On the Tuesday a young woman held the plane up to the light and asked whether you could really just get in one and not come back. Mrs Pruett said the words were only a joke about a Sunday in a field, and the woman laughed a beat too quickly and bought the teacup instead, saying she wanted something that would get her noticed. Mrs Pruett wrapped it in tissue paper and tucked a card in with it, written backwards so it would read the right way only once it was held up to the window. Outside, the tide was coming in over the groynes, and the sign at the end of the pier had lost its last two letters again.