Three die-cut flash-style sticker designs on a grey surface: a guitar with flowers and banner text, a red and white aeroplane, and a pen and harpoon above flowers.

Three flash sticker designs: guitar, plane and harpoon

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

Three separate die-cut sticker designs sit on a grey surface, each drawn in a tattoo flash style with outlined banner scrolls. The top design shows an acoustic guitar with pink flowers and a banner reading 'We'll make pretend that you and me lived ever after happily'. The lower left design shows a red and white light aeroplane with a banner reading 'Excuse us while we sing to the sky', and the lower right shows a blue pen and a harpoon above a cluster of flowers with the words 'Some see a pen, I see a harpoon'.

Traditional Guitar Aeroplane Pen Flower Banner Lettering Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Dessie could never leave a biro alone. He'd take the cap off at the counter in Pollard's shop, turn it over in his fingers, and by the time Mrs Pollard had counted out his change he'd decided it was a harpoon and was stalking the tinned peaches. Mother said it came from the war, though Dessie had been seven when it ended and had spent most of it under the kitchen table with a library book about whaling.

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The summer he turned twelve, the Hallam girl came up the lane with a guitar that had only four strings and a voice like a kettle coming to the boil. Her father flew a red and white two-seater out of the water meadow on Sundays, and when it was up in the air Nell would stand in the hay with her chin lifted and shout that they were excusing themselves, that they were singing to the sky, and would Dessie please stop looking for whales in the clouds. He never did stop. They sat in the stubble with her guitar across their knees and made up a story about two people who lived ever after happily, which mostly meant arguing over who got to be the prince.

Then the Hallams moved to Carlisle and took the plane with them. Dessie kept the pen. Nell wrote once, on a page torn from a seed catalogue, and the envelope was addressed to Some See A Pen, Pollard's Shop, because she knew Mrs Pollard would never let it go astray. Inside were three words in her round capitals: I see a harpoon. Dessie read it in the shop doorway and laughed until Mrs Pollard came out to see whether he'd swallowed a peach stone.

The pen is still in his shirt pocket, and the catalogue page is pinned above the kettle. When I asked him last Christmas why he'd never gone to Carlisle, he clicked the pen, looked at the tin of peaches on the dresser, and said the ending was still being written.