Black and grey traditional tattoo of a vintage car front with a ribbed grille and headlights, above a banner reading DAD, on a limb.

Vintage car with DAD banner

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the front of a vintage car with a ribbed chrome grille, round headlights, a windscreen and a bumper, viewed slightly from above. A pale banner with black outlines sits across the lower part of the design and reads DAD. The car is shaded in greys with bold black outlines and highlights, and the design fills a roughly square area of the skin.

Traditional Other Car Banner Dad Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grille came off the coupe in three pieces, and Ray Hollis swore at each of them as if they had personally insulted his mother. Forty-one years the car had sat under a tarpaulin behind the Co-op in Bolton, and it had come out smelling of mice and old petrol. Ray wiped the chrome bars one by one with a rag soaked in vinegar, counting them under his breath, because his father had always said a grille with a missing tooth was a grille that had given up.

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The boy from the council offices came by on the Thursday with a clipboard and a face like a wet Sunday. He wanted to know who was going to pay the scrapyard fee. Ray told him the coupe had been bought with a Co-op dividend and a bag of nails, and that he was not selling it to anybody who called it a banger. The boy looked at the headlights, round as two saucers, and went away without writing anything down.

By the autumn the bodywork was grey primer and the dents were out of the wing. Ray drove it to the front at Blackpool with the windows down and a tin of mint imperials rattling on the dash. Near the pier a gull landed on the bonnet and stared at its own reflection in the windscreen, and Ray laughed until he had to pull into the kerb.

When they buried him, the sign painter who owed the family a favour lettered a black banner for the flowers, and Ray kept the coupe. He never fixed the nicked bumper on the passenger side, and he never once let anyone else polish the grille. Every Sunday he sat in the driver's seat with the engine off and the key turned to the first click, waiting for a sound that did not come.