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In September 2021, we launched our first-ever creative writing competition, offering the chance to win £1,000. We were blown away by the high number of quality entries we received and picking a winner and runners-up was extremely difficult for the Cartridge People judging panel.
We are delighted to announce that our winner is Sarah Wilson for her short story “She Etched Liberty Into My Skin”.
Our five runners-up are:
- Yvonne Hendrie – Maisie’s Legacy
- Abi Ainscough – The Gleaner Of Broken Things
- Harri Shoppee – The Monsters From Earth
- Ella Thompson – Lost Boy
- Karen Miller – The Season Of Badwill
Sarah, a 21-year-old English Language and Literature student at the University Of Nottingham, told Cartridge People:
“I’ve always loved writing but this is the first competition I’ve ever entered so I really wasn’t expecting to win. It’s amazing to know that people enjoy my work, I’ve always wanted to write pieces that people can identify with and I hope I’ve achieved that here.”
When asked about what advice she’d give to other writers, Sarah added:
“As for tips for fellow writers, until now I hadn’t really considered myself one, rather just a person who enjoyed writing. Probably the only tip I have is don’t restrict yourself in what you write, a good story can come out of anything – the idea for this one came in late October when I was getting my first tattoo and I sort of just thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if you could grow flowers from your skin’ and it evolved from there. I have a tendency to write any cool sentences or images that pop into my head and make a story around those.”
We at Cartridge People understand that as part of the creative writing process, the drafting and editing can mean a huge demand to print so that notes can be made and the work can be read away from the screen to offer a fresh perspective. Cartridge People Content Manager, Andy Davies explains:
“Having come from a Creative Writing background, I know too well that there can be a cost to the creative process through printing. The fact is that it’s often so much easier to have a hard copy of your work to go over before submitting it for coursework assignments, publishers or even competitions. We wanted to run a competition to offer a writer the chance to win £1,000 cash prize and also let people know that printing doesn’t have to be expensive. Using Cartridge People Own Brand cartridges, identifying the right mono printer for documents and using printer settings to switch to draft modes are just some of the ways to cut those costs down. Sarah’s short story was outstanding and we hope she enjoys her cash prize. We’re delighted to also have provided runners-up prizes to five other entrants who impressed our judges with their writing!”
Our Winner: “She Etched Liberty Into My Skin” by Sarah Wilson
Flowers bloomed from my fingertips, an itch beneath my nail beds as the seeds sprouted violets. I was eleven and we were at the beach. I had run ahead of my mother, pitching and twirling across the uneven sand, the mind of a ballerina in the body of a clumsy child who hadn’t yet found her footing in the world. My mother’s cries to come back were held hostage by the wind which blew salt-crusted hair into my laughing mouth, the taste of the sea in my lungs. Soon enough I was away, kidnapped by the ocean spray and feeling lighter than I thought possible.
She can’t have been much older than me, the girl with the short dark hair and canary yellow jumper, the sleeves of which billowed out like the wings of a seabird. Our eyes met and suddenly my mouth was full of flowers. I felt them push at my lips as she flashed a smile my way, and their stems wrapped around my tongue, sliding down my throat and squeezing the air from my lungs. I saved the memory of that smile, locking it in the depths of my growing garden in a gilded cage. Sand stung my face as I watched her glide away on the wind, and I carried on watching until she was a mere speck of yellow on the distant sand, becoming a part of the swirling landscape, lost in a desert storm. Even as my mother finally caught up to me, face red but eyes as cold as the sea chill, I couldn’t look away, my head turned over my shoulder. But as she snatched my hand in her rough, work-worn grip, the flowers at my fingertips fell away, their roots pulled by her harsh tugging and weeding, her angered murmurs of ‘it’s rude to stare.’ I don’t know if she noticed the trail of petals and snapped stems I left floating behind me with each longing glance I cast back. Maybe she didn’t want to.
The next time my flowers grew I was thirteen, and they burst forth with a violence I didn’t recognize. For a while it seemed I couldn’t open my mouth without an onslaught of blooms budding forth. But I looked around at the others in my class, a sardine can of perfectly uniform pencil skirts and blazers, hazy grey and navy blue, and I don’t know why, but I knew the flowers were best kept to myself. I would stare at the pale face reflected in the bathroom mirror, lips trembling and daring to part before the creaking swing of the door would snap them shut again and I would shuffle out, gaze fixed to a floor so covered with stain and grime that it seemed to mimic that swirling sandstorm which saw my first bloom. But the air smelt of stale disinfectant and the floor was too hard, too real beneath my feet. I didn’t feel light here.
As careful as I was silence never lasts forever, and mine broke like an engorged dam, buds shooting from every pore, my hair transformed into tangled vines and not an inch of skin could be seen beneath the forest I called my own. We were both fourteen and I was foolish enough to think it safe to share the beauty I had found within myself. I should have known better. Children never can seem to keep a secret and it didn’t take three days before I found myself sat between four pale, grey walls and four pale, grey faces looming down on my with a circus clowns frown etched into each. The stark red of my mother’s lipstick standing out from her ashen face like a slash of blood on impure snow. Behind the anger in her eyes I saw fear, doubt, betrayal but it was the look of unknowing that slowed the blood in my veins. I wasn’t her daughter. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing, something other masquerading as her child. Wearing their skin like an ill-fitting Halloween costume.
The floor cracked beneath me as I became rooted before the desk, the voice of the stern, serious looking man in front of me buzzed, the sound of fruit flies swarming the decaying carcass of an apple. I could feel their tiny legs tickling over my skin, tangling in my hair. Never had I felt so heavy, constricted by the weighted air and droning hum of that voice, and I don’t think I had known shame until then.
‘We can help, but first you need to admit that what you are doing is wrong.’ He spoke slowly with deliberate intent, weasel eyes starting over thin-framed glasses, with the type of glare that could have caused hell to freeze over with a few degrees to spare.
‘I don’t need to be helped,’ was my reply, my attempt at bravado. There wasn’t anything wrong with me.
They didn’t like that, and so they sent me away. They clipped at my leaves, wrenched the vines from my head, plucked the petals that swelled from my fingertips till I was stripped bare, and as the final vestiges of the beauty I had come to love withered and fell to the stone floor of that prison of stained glass and marble carvings, they poisoned my roots. Casting incantations to the click-clack of a rosary, potions of incense and blessed water to desolate my landscape, administered by snakes in gilded robes. They cast my garden out of me and sealed me under lock and key. They stole my garden from me.
Some plants are carnivorous you know. And when they dissolve you from the inside there is no relief. The flowers suffocated me, vines becoming entangled in my veins and around my brain as my body becomes a jungle I no longer knew. Moss clogged my lungs and when it became too much my eyes dripped dandelion wishes. With every movement, every strained smile, I was pushed from the inside out until my skin threatened to burst. When the family interrogation rolled around, with the politely pointed questions they stab into my sides, the vines pulsed to the steady beat of a war drum.
‘Don’t you think it’s time you settled down dear?’
A forced chuckle.
‘When can I be expecting grandchildren then?’
An awkward shrug.
‘You know we’re only looking out for you love. I promise you’ll like him and if you don’t I won’t interfere again.’
I can taste the lie. The date was terrible. He’s boring, I’m clearly uninterested and when all is said and done I don’t think the food was up to much either which, considering the price, was probably the most disappointing part of the evening. After all, I was already prepared to be uninspired by the company. But the meal, that was a let-down.
The cycle repeated. Some are nice, some aren’t, and each time I’m promised it will be the last. The drink made it easier, and the comfortable haze, the dream-like state it would put me in made the seemingly endless barrage of my mother’s friend’s ‘eligible’ sons almost bearable. So, I drank a little more. I don’t know when I started to use wine as my weed killer – when the sickly, acrid tang which burnt me from the inside out become my crutch, but I do know I could feel it. I had never seen self-destruction as my style, but I don’t think we can every truly know ourselves. Not really. Perhaps I just wanted to prove to myself that my body was still mine.
I was 27 when I met her, at the tail-end of my bad decisions, facing consequences I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Her hands weaved patterns into my skin and the pain is cleansing, and healing, and feels like letting go. Like the snapping of the coils which kept me captive within myself. The sun is in her smile, and when she directs it as me I feel the flowers bloom once again, and my heartbeat grows faster when I trace the dancing lines embedded into her skin, glowing in the neon pink lighting of the parlour.
My angel came with a halo of strobe lights, and now she etches liberty onto my skin with every stroke of the needle, its buzzing a distant heavenly choir. I smell the ink on her skin mixed with the dust of the attic room as she works, and it smells like returning to the memory of a childhood home. With every scratch of colour a new sapling blooms from the soil of my flesh, and now I when I speak petals tumble from my parted lips in a tidal wave, which washes over me in the same way it did when I floated on that beach all those years ago, staring at a girl in a canary yellow jumper.
Terms and Conditions
Full Terms and Conditions regarding the competition are shown below and for further guidance on creative writing competitions, we’d encourage writers to read the Competition or Cut-Price Commission? study from the Writers’ Guild Of Great Britain.
1. This competition is being run as a short story creative writing contest. No purchase necessary and no entry fee required.
2. The winner will receive a £1000 cash prize. There is only one £1,000 winning prize available for this competition.
3. There will be five runners-up prizes which will consist of an Epson WorkForce WF-2810DWF A4 Colour Multifunction Inkjet Printer, Cartridge People Own Brand printer cartridges and additional stationery.
4. The runners-up prizes are subject to availability, non-transferable and there are no cash alternatives. Cartridge People Limited reserves the right to substitute the prize, for any reason, with one of comparable or greater value.
5. To enter the competition, you must submit a short story with a minimum 1,000 words and no more than 1,500 words (title not included). Entries must be the writer’s own work. Entries must also be made in English.
6. Entries must be submitted in the author’s own name. This should be included when submitting the short story via the competition page, along with an email address so you can be contacted if you’re the winner or runner-up.
7. Entries must not have been published, self-published, published on any website, blog or online forum, broadcast, have won or been placed (2nd, 3rd, runner up etc) in any other competition.
8. Any entry subsequently published in another UK, magazine, anthology, audiobook or part of a podcast (unless scheduled for such publication prior to Entry) between the opening of the competition and the announcement of the winner will not be eligible for a prize.
9. Entries can be submitted via the entry form on our competition page or sent to: FAO Marketing Manager, Cartridge People, Unit, 13, Orion Park, Crewe, CW1 6NG. Please note that no postal entries can be returned. Cartridge People Ltd will not be liable for any failure of receipt of entries.
10. The short story must be your original creative work, and you hereby warrant and represent that you are the sole and exclusive owner.
11. By entering this competition, authors acknowledge and agree that the winner shall be cleared and can be used for publicity purposes to generate coverage for the competition and Cartridge People Ltd across media outlets, in a format, manner and for such time as may be determined by Cartridge People Ltd.
12. By entering this competition, authors acknowledge and agree that the winner and runners-up will have their name published on the Cartridge People website and through their social media channels.
13. By entering this competition, authors acknowledge and agree that the winner will have their short story published on the Cartridge People website.
14. Information collected from entrants is subject to Cartridge People Ltd’s Privacy Policy which is available here.
15. There is only one short story entry per person permissible.
16. By entering your email address as part of this competition, you agree to receive occasional marketing emails from Cartridge People Ltd. Your email address will not be shared with any third parties.
17. The winner of the competition will be picked from all the eligible qualifying entrants by a judging panel selected by Cartridge People Ltd. The winner is responsible for ensuring they are able to accept the prize as set out in accordance with these terms within 10 working days of email notification. In the event that the prize isn’t claimed after 7 working days, Cartridge People Ltd reserves the right to award the prize to another of the eligible entries.
18. The decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into with any individual who seeks to challenge the decision made.
19. The winner will be notified via email and will be asked to provide details so they can receive the £1,000 prize. Likewise, the runners-up will also be notified via email and asked for details so the runner-up prizes can be delivered.
20. This competition is not open to employees of Cartridge People Ltd or its suppliers and affiliates.
21. This offer is being run by The Cartridge People Ltd, Unit 13, Orion Park, Crewe, Cheshire, CW1 6NG.
22. Cartridge People Ltd reserves the right to amend these rules at any time.
23. The competition will run from 13/09/2021 to 01/11/2021 inclusive. All entries must be received by midnight on the closing date in order to qualify.
24. Cartridge People Ltd reserves the right to amend the promotion end date at any time without prior notification.
25. Cartridge People Ltd shall not be responsible for any damage, loss or disappointment suffered by any individual taking part or not being able to take part in the competition.
26. In all matters, the Directors of Cartridge People Ltd decisions are final and no correspondence will be entered into.
27. This competition is open to UK & Channel Island residents only.
28. Entrants must be aged 18 or over to enter.
29. Competition results will be posted publicly on the respective contest website page. Names of the winner and runners-up will also be made public and permanently posted to the Cartridge People website.
30. By entering, all eligible entrants will be deemed to have accepted these rules and to agree to be bound by each and all of these terms and conditions.