Illustrated flash design of purple angel wings and a halo framing a dark car in front of a full moon, with a banner reading Carry on my wayward son.

Winged banner with car and moon

Colour · Flash

A digital illustration of a tattoo design showing a dark car centred in front of a large pale moon, with gravestones along its top edge. Two dark purple feathered wings with a faint halo above them frame the composition, and a grey banner across the middle carries the words Carry on my wayward son. Shading is soft and painterly on a pale pink background, with colour limited to purples, yellow and black.

Wing Halo Banner Car Moon Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Lantern Ballroom at Saltmere had been playing the same waltz since the tide turned, and Dora Vance was still on the boards when a long black motor rolled up the shingle with its headlamps off. Nobody in the village had seen that car since her brother Tom drove it away the autumn the mill closed. He had promised to write. The letters stopped in March, and Maud at the door kept the postcards in a biscuit tin behind the bar.

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The moon hung over the bay, big and yellow as a church candle, and the gravestones on the headland stood up black against it. Maud said the dead liked a dance as well as anyone, which was why nobody ever swept the floor. Dora had heard the old saying since she was small: a boy who takes a black car out at moonrise must keep the road moving, or the road keeps him.

The driver's door opened. A young man got out, touched his cap to Maud, and asked for Dora by her full name, the way only Tom ever had. He held out his hand. The fiddle stopped. Dora did not take it. She said the road ran both ways, and if he wanted her to ride with him he would have to come in off the shingle and dance first, because she was not going anywhere with a man who would not stay for the last tune.

He laughed, and it was Tom's laugh, and then it was not. He went back to the car and drove up the coast road with the lamps blazing. In the morning the boards were dusted with one black feather, and on the headland a new stone stood beside the old ones with no name on it yet. Dora swept the feather into her palm and kept it, and every night after that she left the back door open a crack, in case anyone wanted to come in off the road.