The Churl With the Flagon Tattoo

Brace yourself for: Swearing(lots of it), churlishness(it's in the title), violence.

“I’ll have my revenge,” said Donny as he was carried from the inn by the ankle. “You haven’t heard the last of me.”

“I bet,” said George. The burly man with tattoos of foxy ladies, lady foxes, and a chicken laying a dragon, tossed the drunk out onto the filthy cobbles of the road. “See you again tomorrow, Donny. Go home.”

“I don’t have a home,” grumbled the man, slurring his words.

“Have you tried not being a dick?” George asked. “Works just fine for everyone else.”

“Funny. I hope you die in your sleep.” Donny smiled with broken, rotting teeth. The tavern door slammed behind George, leaving the greying wretch alone on his arse. “Fuck you world.” Donny pushed with his hands, trying to stand. Pale, trembling legs and a spinning head warred with his ambitions to walk.

Smoke City was a tough place for drunken sailors in the dark. One silhouetted ramshackle home looked much like the others when the whole world was a blur. Instinct and a tolerance born of many years of indulgence carried Donny back on a wavering course to his former home. His landlady had changed the lock the day before.

Her door was ivy green, and freshly painted no more than a decade ago. He hammered on the door. “Let me in, you old hag.” He blinked his way through a dizzy spell.

Shutters creaked open above him. “What do you want, Donny? It’s the middle of the night.” Her long nose caught the moonlight which had peaked through clouds. Seeing the crusty world below, the moon decided it wanted none of it. Clouds sheltered the precious satellite from the shameful world below.

“Let me in.” He slapped a gnarled hand against the door.

“Got my rent?” Her gold earrings glittered in what little light the smothered moon afforded the world.

“I don’t have anything,” he said. Pulling out his pocket, he tugged it away from his brown stained shirt.

“You’ll always have your sparkling personality, Donny. No one can take that away from you. No matter how hard we try.” Her frown was born of years of trying to be decent with the ungrateful drunk.

“Let me in. I’ll have to sleep in the street otherwise. Do you want that on your conscience?” He tried to give her puppy dog eyes. It failed thanks to the cool darkness and her failing eyesight.

“Somehow I’ll survive,” she assured him with a mockingly sincere tone. The liver spots on her hand contrasted with her wheat coloured nightgown as she put her hand to her heart. “It’s not all bad. You’ll be dead some day.” Her voice brightened at the words.

“How is that good news?” he asked, neck hurting to look up the three storeys to her.

“It makes me feel better.” He’d bitten the hand that roofed him too many times. She shrugged and slammed the shutters closed.

“Cow!” He kicked the door, stubbing his toe. Laughing with a rasping sound that belied the poor state of his lungs, he pulled down his trousers and urinated on the door. His laugh became a hacking cough.

Alcohol in his veins became a full bladder and a headache. At the best of times Donny was in a bad mood. Rubbing his head with fingers covered with tattoos of his old gangs, he longed for the old days when he could beat people to a pulp for making eye contact with him.

Then came the latest plague. Even having survived it, he was never the same. His creaking bones shook off muscle as if they’d developed an allergy. He wandered into the rotten heart of the city where the very first stained glass had been used to make lanterns for the red light district.

Beautiful women stood in the windows. The glass was protected by intricately formed wrought iron. Brawny men stood in the doors. Some men had bats in their hands, others preferred knives. They had more gold teeth than real ones, if only he’d had the strength to rob them.

“Any coins for an old man?” Donny asked, holding out his cupped hands as he passed men and women in fine suits, admiring the ladies of the finer establishments.

“Fuck off, Donny,” was the concensus among the well to do and the sailors alike.

Nodding at the familiar response, he walked on. A temple to the god of people who drink water because they can’t be bothered brewing a good beer was just a few streets away and he knew his way over the wall.

A cat he’d once kicked hissed at him from a roof of crumbling slate. “Bite me,” he told the feline. Hackles up, teeth showing, the mangy cat biting him seemed possible. With another hiss, the ginger tom swished its tail at Donny and turned away.

Finding the wall where he’d left it the last time, Donny stuck his foot in the hole where a brick had been and pushed himself up, reaching for the top. His calloused fingers held his weight as he hauled himself up and tumbled over. Landing on his back in a patch of flowers, he lay there among the brightest petals in all of Smoke City.

Despite the pain of the fall, the flowers were the softest bed he seemed likely to lie on. Donny pillowed his hands behind his head and counted the women he’d bedded. “Clara and Elmira and-” Two. “Women,” he said with a vicious tone. “Who needs ‘em.”

Groaning to his feet, he heard the bitter crackle of his aching knees. The water barrel the monks drank from awaited him with nowhere to run. Dunking his head in he shook it beneath the surface and filled his mouth. Once pristine water had a film of filth when he withdrew. He gulped down the cool liquid and reached for a cup on a shelf by the barrel. Drinking his fill, he spat in the cup and threw it into the flowerbed.

“Suckers,” he smiled, swearing at the temple before throwing himself over the wall again.

The dark blue of the sea on the horizon peaked from between crooked roofs as he walked downhill, south towards the docks. Salt water, rotting seaweed and decomposing fish crawled into his nostrils on the chilling wind.

Orange tints in the night forewarned of another fucking day. Seeing a fish drying on a string, he clambered up to the balcony with the grace of a monkey high on opium. “Why don’t I have any opium?” he wondered aloud. Grabbing at the fish, he ripped it from the string, spraying scraps of it across the balcony. He jumped down onto lobster traps and, thinking it would be a great source of food, carried one with him.

Picking his teeth with a bone, the churl sat on a pier. Boats bobbed on the water as the sun rose. Golden light danced on the shifting waves. Throwing the bones of the stolen fish into the water, he looked for a good spot for his trap. One piece of fish sat in the creel to tempt his next meal. Seeing tiny fish in the shallow water beneath the pier, he jumped in. Flapping around, he pulled the lobster trap in with him and paddled towards a pillar beneath the planks of the boardwalk.

The amber disk of the sun kissed the horizon goodbye for the day and set off into the grey sky. A red blur in the water ahead drew Donny’s eyes from the squawking seagulls. It zigged and zagged towards him at a speed a shark would envy. Holding to the pier pillar for comfort, his heart rate spiked. Long overdue vomit from the night’s drinking offered to show up in his defence.

A beauty the like of which his eyes had never seen emerged from the water. Murk that seemed to film the water all along the southern coast had parted for her. Azure blue as it had never been revealed the gradual transition from womanly hips to a serpentine fish’s tail. Pearlescent scales played with the light, all the better to illuminate the mermaid.

“Stop looking at me like that,” said the siren with hair the ruby red hair as she covered her bare chest with her hands. “Creep.”

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” Donny gasped.

“No shit, dumbass,” said the girl. Each word she spoke with her enchanting voice showed her viper’s teeth. “I thought you were some sailor about to drown.”

“And you came to rescue me?”

“No, fuckhead. I came to eat you.” Emerald green eyes were a hook in his heart and loins that he had no intention of ripping out. If not for lingering alcohol, he’d have shown his appreciation for her curves with a trouser tent.

Spreading his veiny arms wide, he smiled invitingly. “Your lips on my flesh. Be my guest. I can’t think of a better way to die.” His red veined eyes raked across her golden skin with the charm of vomit breath.

“No chance,” her full lips curled in disgust. “I’d catch something.” Her cheeks dimpled as she smirked at the thought that a daughter of the God of Drowning Death might stoop to feasting on Donny’s rotting soul wrapped in shriveled hatred.

“Wonder what I’d get selling your carcass for sushi?” he asked her, bitter as used tobacco leaves.

“Not a copper. I’ll cut you into meat slabs before you get the chance. Not that anyone would eat it. Disgusting sack of shit.” She spat black ink at him and vanished with a splash.

His eyes followed the streak of red in the water on the way to the horizon and out of sight. “Stuck up sea tart. You swim in the world’s biggest latrine.” Black, itching ink was acidic on his tongue. He spat and waded out as the filth that had parted for the Princess of the Sea merged again around Donny.

Storming back through the city to give his former landlady a piece of his mind, Donny walked right into a trio of sailors. All three had sleeves of tattoos showing sea monsters, anchors and beautiful women on their ropey arms.

“Watch it,” said one with an earring of silver. He pushed Donny in retaliation.

“Watch it yourself, prick.” Donny swung a fist at the man’s face which took a detour to land without much impact on the man’s prominent pectoral.

Given that the churl’s bowels evacuated as he was kicked and punched all over, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say he had the shit kicked out of him.

“Gods, did he?” The slimmest of the three turned away, covering his nose and mouth with his hand.

“Yeah, loser shat himself.”

“Fuck this, back to the Red Lantern. Esmerelda said to visit her when I was back in port.” Forgetting him, even as he lay at their feet, bruised and bleeding, the sailors departed.

“Wankers,” Donny gasped through bleeding teeth. He spat out a tooth which had long threatened to leave him. Clutching at his aching ribs, he peered about for clothes to steal. A bedsheet was all he could find to give him dignity as he wiped himself clean in the bright light of the morning.

Wrapping the sheet around him as if it was a toga, he hobbled to the city graveyard to visit his parents. An entire hillside have been given over to the dead of Smoke City. Corpses outnumbered the living by great multiples. Tombstones, urns, paupers graves and grand mausoleums had their own corners that were slowly merging as the centuries ground on.

Snatching some fresh daisies from a slab of sandstone he couldn’t read, he walked to the pauper’s corner. His mother and father rotted with the poor taken by the puking plague. Only a moldy wooden stump marked their final resting place.

Having found a single dram of whiskey on a merchant’s grave, he held it high in salute to the dead. “Mum, dad, I never knew you, but I hope you’re somewhere better than this hell.”

He drank the fiery liquid and winced. Whiskey on his burst lip stung viciously. “I hate this life.” Sinking to his knees, he sobbed. “When I got this tattoo,” he pointed to the flagon in the center of his chest, “it was meant to mean optimism. A flagon half full was the idea. I don’t feel like that now. I can’t remember my last good day. The flagon’s half empty now.”

A high wail echoed over the hillside. Roused from his sorrows, Donny looked around, seeing only the stone carvings of messengers and ships and the mausoleums in the west. The crying echoed off every stone surface, making the origin hard to pinpoint. Each step hurt his ribs. His back ached as much. Blood flowed from his nose into his mouth. Limping along, he heard the screams growing louder.

“Shut up, idiot. Respect the dead,” he said.

On the grass between stones he found a wriggling bundle. A red face contorted with rage sat among the bloody rags of a bedsheet.

“Oi,” Donny yelled. “Who dumped their baby?” Turning around slowly there was no one. Whoever had left the baby had run. “Sorry, baby. I can’t look after you. Better luck in the next life little one. Try not to end up in a crappy world like this.” He turned and walked.

The baby wailed.

He kept walking.

Primal screams prodded at his headache.

Donny kept walking.

“Not my problem,” he said to himself.

The wailing took a deep breath and blew new life into the dying flame of his conscience.

“Fuck.”

Moving back, he picked up the red rags. The wriggling stopped. Tiny blue eyes met his. It stopped crying. Closing its eyes, the baby slept.

Clutching the bundle, he looked out over the ocean. Crying again, he held it close. “Fine. What now then?”