Outline tattoo on an upper arm with poppies, a clock heart, a cross, a witch hat and a striped stocking, beside a coloured design drawing of the same motifs.

Wizard of Oz themed design on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The right photograph shows an upper arm with a partly inked black outline tattoo of poppies, a heart shaped clock, a cross, a spiral and a witch's hat above a striped stocking. The left panel is a coloured drawing of the same design, with red poppies, a yellow lattice spiral and the words 'a brain a heart a home the nerve' in script. The tattoo itself appears to be black linework with solid black accents and no grey or colour shading yet.

Upper arm Poppy Clock Heart Cross Spiral Lattice Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Stan,

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The band at the Pier Pavilion played Pack Up Your Troubles twice tonight because the bandleader had forgotten the words to everything else, and I stood at the cloakroom hatch counting hats until my hands smelled of camphor. Mrs Pritchard has taken the mirror ball down to polish and says it looks like a moon somebody nicked. I still have Father Lowe's tin cross in my apron pocket, the one you were meant to bring home, and I rub its raised letters every time a coat comes across the counter.

Everything here is as it was, only louder without you. Girls draw seams up the backs of their legs in eyebrow pencil and dance with fellows in khaki greatcoats, and they all want the same thing, a ticket that says they were somewhere worth going. Last Saturday a soldier from the Ninth came in on a wooden leg and asked me, very politely, whether the floor was laid in yellow lattice under the varnish, because he had dreamt it that way. I said I hadn't looked. Later he danced with a girl wearing a witch's hat she'd made from rolled-up newspaper, and they laughed until the band gave up.

You wrote that the poppies over there grow so thick the lads call them blood in a good mood. I walked down to the bombed lot by the gasworks this morning and found three of them, and I pressed one inside the watch you left on my dressing table. Its hands still say twenty past three, the minute you wound it and went off to the station. I haven't had the heart to set it right.

Come home by the spring. I'll hand you your coat myself, and you can tell me what the heart and the nerve and the brain were for in the end, because I've kept your ticket stub too.