Colour traditional tattoo of a tiki mask with orange flowers and green leaves running down the side of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiki mask and flowers on ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A carved tiki face with a wide, grimacing mouth and bold dark outlines forms the centre of the design, with its headdress rising towards the top of the frame. Orange blossoms and green leaves surround the figure, with soft tan shading on the mask and petals. The vertical design follows the curve of the side of the torso.

Traditional Ribs Flower Plumeria Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has got under the canvas again, and your uncle is swearing at the tent pegs in the dark field behind the dodgems. Hold the lamp steady, he says, and not on me, on the mask. You have been holding it for an hour. The mask sits on the trestle between the candyfloss tub and a crate of rope, its wooden grin wide enough to swallow a shilling, its carved headdress hanging down either side like the mane of something that has given up on being frightening.

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Len bought it in 1962 from a sailor in Portsmouth who swore the grimace was there to keep the weather off. The paper flowers strung round the booth were made by the ladies from the Co-op, tissue cut into plumeria and orange blossom, the leaves torn from a seed catalogue and glued on with flour paste. Every March the paint lifts and he touches it up with a brush no bigger than an eyelash, muttering that the sea air is in the wood now and always will be.

Tonight a woman from the next pitch comes over with her purse open. Forty pounds, she says, and when Len shakes his head she offers the lot, the garlands too. You watch his hands as he turns the mask over in the lamplight. They are not steady. He tells her it has always been for keeping things out, the wet, the buyers, the nights he lies awake listening to the generator cough. She goes back to her caravan without the mask and without a word.

Later you take the lamp and tilt it so the orange of the petals catches the wood. Len laughs for the first time all week, a short bark that surprises you both. Leave it, he says. It is ugly enough to be ours. You wrap it in the wet tarpaulin and wedge it behind the seat of the van, and all the way to the next town its grin is turned towards you, as if it has heard the joke too.