Colour traditional tattoo on a thigh showing banners reading Don't Forget The Important Things, with a red flame motif in a blue circle and teal and orange flowers.

Traditional banner quote on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A traditional style tattoo with bold black outlines sits on the outer thigh. Two banners carry the lettering Don't Forget and Important, with The and Things set in smaller vertical text along the sides, around a blue circle containing red flame or cloud shapes and an orange band. Teal and orange flowers sit at the top and lower right, and the shading is solid with flat colour fills.

Traditional Thigh Banner Quote Flower Flame Circle Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Saturday the lodgers left something on the hall table: a glove, a hairbrush, once a denture case with no teeth in it. I logged each item in the brown book my mother kept before me, then binned it, because that was the rule at Seaview House. The blue glass float was the exception. Nobody claimed it. It sat beside the barometer for three weeks, its red swirls looking like something simmering under ice.

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My mother painted the sign above the kitchen door in 1971, DON'T FORGET THE IMPORTANT THINGS, in gold paint bought for a wedding that never happened. When young Tom Ashby asked her what counted as important, she said the list changed with the tides. He was sixteen and I was nine, and I didn't understand that she meant it kindly. The float had come off a trawler off Mumbles, she said, and her father had hung one over his bed for luck.

Last October a man in a grey coat came asking for it. He knew the orange band before he knew my face. He turned the float over twice, found the chip on its base, and said his brother had lost it in the surf the summer they were boys. I wanted to ask why he had waited fifty years. Instead I wrapped it in yesterday's newspaper and handed it across the counter, and he slid a folded note under the saucer for the cup of tea I hadn't offered. I opened the brown book to write the entry: one float, returned. Then, beneath it, I wrote the line my mother never had the nerve to write: one brother, found.