Close-up of a colourful traditional-style tattoo on the upper arm, showing a pointed elongated shape with yellow rings, red and orange rays and black lightning bolts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional colour design on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an elongated, pointed form in teal and black outlined in bold black linework, with two yellow ringed circles and streaks of red, orange and yellow radiating across it. Black lightning bolts cut diagonally across the right side, and the design is bordered by a pale teal area. Colour is dominant and the composition fills the upper arm in a rounded, flowing shape.

Traditional Upper arm Lightning bolt Ray Abstract shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had built the thing from a cardboard tube, a tin of Cuprinol and a nose cone he'd turned on the lathe at work, and for three weeks it sat on the kitchen table like a visitor nobody had invited. Mum kept moving it to put the teapot down. By the Saturday of the fête, Eddie and I had decided it was going to Mars, or at least as far as the cricket pavilion.

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We carried it up Hollins Lane in a pram with one wheel that wobbled like a drunk. The field behind the church was full of bunting and wasps. The vicar's wife had set out a tombola and a tray of Bakewell tarts that nobody was allowed to touch. Eddie wanted to launch from the middle of the crowd. I wanted the bank by the brook, where the grass was long and nobody could tell us off. We argued over it the way you argue at ten, which is to say with our whole bodies, and in the end the rocket decided for us by tipping over onto a bramble.

The fuse went on the second try. It hissed, then screamed, and the thing lifted off the grass with a noise like a kettle thrown down the stairs. Sparks came off it in yellow rings. It swung left over the brook, caught a gust that smelled of cut hay, and for three full seconds it was the most beautiful thing in Lancashire. Then the nose dipped, the tail flared red, and it came down in the churchyard among the gravestones of people who had seen worse.

Nobody died. The vicar's wife cried a little. Dad said nothing at all, which was worse, and then, on the walk home, he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the kerb. "Next year," he said, wiping his eyes, "we aim it at the pavilion."