Black and grey tattoo on the inner forearm of a winged man in a top hat and moustache, with a banner reading reduce air pressure and coloured squares behind him.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged gentleman and pixel squares on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A winged man in a top hat, bow tie and moustache stands with his arms raised, holding a triangle above his head. A curved banner with partly visible lettering runs across his body, and small geometric shapes sit below him. The figure is worked in black ink with fine stipple shading, while the background is a grid of blue, yellow and orange squares.

Forearm Man Top hat Wing Moustache Banner Triangle Circle Square Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass plate beside the lift said REDUCE AIR PRESSURE in letters worn soft by a century of thumbs, and Cyril Dacre had read it every morning for eleven years without once wondering what it meant. He kept the night ledgers at the Halstead Tabulating Works, where the day's figures came up the iron stairs at four o'clock on squares of card, each punched full of small square holes, and each had to be checked against the column before the lamps were lit.

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On the first Thursday of October the card that came up was wrong. Where the figures should have been there was a pencil drawing: a gentleman with a moustache like a fishing hook, a top hat, and great folded wings, lifting a glass triangle over his head as though he had just caught the sun in it. Beneath him ran a curled banner. Cyril copied the words into the margin, then the hours from the wall clock, 5 pm, 7 am, 9 pm, and the sum came out to nothing at all.

At nine he climbed to the cupola with the card buttoned inside his coat and the triangle, which he had found in a drawer of broken prisms, held up in both hands. The wind off the estuary pressed at the glass. He turned the vent, and the pressure in the stairwell fell away like a held breath, and the grid of lamplit windows below slid into order, blue, yellow, orange, until the whole town looked like a page waiting to be filled in. His boots left the boards by an inch, then by a foot.

He came down at dawn, when the boy arrived with fresh card. Cyril handed him the drawing and showed him a single punched hole in the corner. 'You'll want to check the figures,' he said, and went home to sleep with the window open, because his shoulder blades itched and he had decided, quite calmly, that he would not be sorry.