Traditional style tattoo of a black umbrella with a green bird-head handle and a red banner reading Anything Can Happen, on a forearm.

Umbrella with banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A closed black umbrella with a green bird-head handle and a hanging tassel sits at the centre of the design, with two small black sparkle marks beside its canopy. A red ribbon banner wraps around the shaft bearing the words ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN in black lettering. The bold black outlines, flat fills and limited palette of black, green and red are typical of a traditional style, shown on a forearm against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Umbrella Bird Tassel Banner Ribbon Lettering Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Mollimar for nine days, and the Lord Chamberlain had decreed that the royal umbrella must stay furled until the sky apologised. You, Keeper of the Umbrella, had carried it through every corridor of the Glasshouse Palace with its jade parrot head tucked under your arm and the red silk tassel swinging against your wrist. Nobody had ever seen it opened. The old saying in Mollimar was that a closed umbrella holds a promise, and an open one spends it.

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On the tenth morning a messenger from Penhallow arrived soaked and red-eyed, carrying word that the river had taken the eastern bridge and the king's wool fleet was stranded on the wrong bank. The Chamberlain wrung his hands. You looked at the umbrella, then at the grey sky, then at his silver pocket watch ticking on the table. Ten minutes until the council sat. Fourteen miles of mud to the river.

You did not ask permission. You strode out through the Gate of Thorns with the umbrella held high, and when the first fat drop struck the black canopy you thumbed the catch. It bloomed open with a crack like a musket, and the rain that bounced off its ribs scattered across the road in a glittering arc. Behind you the bells began to ring, and the sky, offended, went quiet.

The fleet came home by dusk. Nobody in Mollimar ever explained how a single black umbrella had carried thirty wool barges across a flood, and you never told them. You hung it back on its hook with the tassel still dripping, and beside it someone had painted, in careful red letters, the saying the old folk had been trying to teach you all along: anything can happen, if you are willing to open the thing.