Colour tattoo of a pumpkin with a green stem and orange splashes on the upper back near the shoulder, seen from behind.

Watercolour pumpkin on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A small pumpkin sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with a curved green stem at the top. The orange body has soft, painterly shading with darker red-brown areas and pale highlights, and loose orange and red splashes surround it. The plain skin and blurred brown background keep the focus on the tattoo.

Shoulder Pumpkin Stem Splashes Vegetable

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pringle had entered the pumpkin in the village show for eleven autumns and never once taken a rosette, so when the judge stopped at her trestle on Thursday morning, she assumed he had come about the damson jam. He was a thin man from Louth with a waxed moustache and a clipboard he held like a hymn book. He turned the pumpkin twice, then asked who had painted the stem.

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Nobody had painted it, not in the sense he meant. The stem had come up green from the compost heap, curled like a question mark. But the young painter from the chapel annexe, Tom Sallow, had been sitting on the churchyard wall for a week sketching it, and on Tuesday night he had flung a jar of rinse water out of his window onto the gourd, insisting the splashes had given it the colour. Ada found him at dawn scrubbing orange off the flagstones with vinegar and a stiff brush, muttering that the accident had ruined his morning.

The judge sniffed. He said a pumpkin was a pumpkin and the rules made no room for accidents. Ada said the rules made no room for a man in a moustache lecturing a woman about her own vegetables, and then she surprised herself by laughing, which made the judge go pink above his collar. Tom appeared in the marquee doorway with a streak of green on his cheek, looking as though he expected to be shouted at.

The rosette went to the pumpkin in the end, a blue one for best in show, pinned on by the judge with poor grace. Ada wheeled it home in a barrow and split it on her kitchen table, and as the knife went through, the flesh inside was the same deep orange as the splashes on the flagstones. She pinned the rosette above the sink and told Tom he could have the seeds, provided he cleaned up the wall first.