Black and grey tattoo of a kangaroo breaking through a torn Australian flag on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Torn Australian flag with kangaroo

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A kangaroo head and shoulders burst through a flag that appears to be torn open, with the Union Jack and Southern Cross stars visible on the fabric-like flag. The kangaroo and torn edges are rendered in smooth black and grey shading with strong contrast, while the flag areas use lighter greys. The tattoo fills the frame against lightly freckled skin, with the flag wave running diagonally across the composition.

Shoulder Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mrs Tully kept the bakery on Harrow Lane, in a town so small that the flag over its door was the only thing anyone bothered to wash. Every morning before the magpies started, she lit the ovens and made bread for the stockmen who rode in from the far paddocks. One dry year she came in to find the back door open, the flour scattered across the boards, and a kangaroo standing in the middle of it all, its ears flat and its chest heaving. It had torn through the flag hung across the yard to get in.

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She did not shout. Her father had taught her that a beast which has come a long way only wants to be told where it is. So she set a loaf on the bench and sat down on an upturned sack. The kangaroo ate the crust, then the soft middle, and watched her with the patience of something that had been hunted and had decided not to be hunted here. She saw the cut on its shoulder where a fence wire had caught it, so she tore a strip from the old calico cloth over the proving tins and bound it up.

By the time the sun cleared the tin roofs, the kangaroo had gone out through the gap in the fence the way it came. The Union Jack hung in the corner of the flag, and the stars of the Southern Cross stood out on the faded blue. Mrs Tully swept the flour off the step and found one grey hair caught in the calico, which she kept in her apron pocket for the rest of her years.

The next morning there was a loaf on the step, still warm, wrapped in a clean strip of cloth. Nobody in Harrow Lane could say who had baked it.