Colour tattoo on a thigh of a smiling Vault Boy with folded arms in front of a mushroom cloud, with the words prepare for the future above.

Vault Boy and mushroom cloud on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a smiling Vault Boy with folded arms in front of a large mushroom cloud, with the lettering prepare for the future across the upper part. Below, grey figures stand on a flat, dusty ground at the base of the design. The clean outlines and soft blended shading sit against a pale blue sky, with yellow, orange and red tones in the cloud.

Thigh Cloud Lettering Figure Sky

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the sign at a crossroads where the tarmac gives up and the road becomes two pale ruts in the dust. A cheerful boy in a blue jumpsuit grins from it, arms folded across his chest as if he has already done the sums and come out ahead. Under his feet someone has stencilled the words prepare for the future, though the sun has been at them so long the last letters are nearly gone. You have been preparing since Tuesday, and the jerrycan in the back says you are behind.

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Grit lifts off the flats and settles on the fence posts. Two grey figures stand in the lee of a concrete hut, hands in their coat pockets, staring at the ridge the way people wait for a late bus. One of them has a shovel propped on his shoulder like a rifle he has forgotten how to use. You ask which way to the next town. Neither answers, though the older one lifts a finger towards the west, where the sky over the hills has gone the colour of a stove left on too long.

You should keep driving. Instead you sit with the engine ticking and the radio hissing out a station that stopped broadcasting years ago, and you think about the boy on the sign, how sure he looked, how his grin never once showed him what was coming up the valley. The cloud climbs, unhurried, pink at the edges and yellow where the light gets into it. It is beautiful in the way a warning is beautiful.

You fold your arms the way he does, just to see how it feels, and find you are smiling too. Then you put the car in gear, lean on the horn for the figures, and take the left fork, the one with no sign at all.