Friday 3 August 2012

Tattoo


A guy walks around the shop, takes a look at a few birds, picks up some bags of seed, comes over to the counter and pays for them. He's about to go when he sees a picture on the wall which he takes as look at, then turns back around to me.

 "Oh, I thought it was a picture of a goldfinch, but it's not. Some kind of foreign finch."
 - Yep, I'm afraid so.
 "Can't seem to find any good goldfinch photographs anywhere."
 - No?

And I think to myself: I've seen thousands of good photographs of goldfinches.

 "Nope. They all seem to be awful drawings, or photos from the wrong angles, or of a bird that doesn't even look particularly healthy."

 He does have a slight point here. Some books have photographs in that make you think, 'Why on earth have you chosen to include that as a example of the species? It looks like it's about to die!'.

 - Yeah, I know what you mean
 "I just want a decent photo of a goldfinch's face. There must be a book with lots of them in."
 - Well, we've got this book...

I hand him one of our own books, which is completely about goldfinches. It's in French, sadly, so my understanding of the contents is somewhat limited, but there are a lot of good photographs.

 "Wow. I wish I'd had this book before."
 - Before?
 "Yeah, look..."

The customer then lifted his shift over his head, revealing his torso to me.

 "See? I've got a tattoo of a goldfinch done already, on my hip."
 - Um. Yeah.
 "And a chaffinch on the other side."
 - ...yep.
 "And I have a bullfinch done around my nipple."
 - So you have...
 "Well, I better go. I wish I'd seen photographs like that before though. Goodbye."

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