Traditional style tattoo of an alligator head wrapped in a laurel branch, in black, grey and orange, on a person's shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alligator head with laurel on shoulder

Traditional · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A bold alligator head faces right, with its open jaw showing teeth and its eye set under a brow line. A sprig of laurel leaves and stems wraps around the top and back of the head. The scales and jaw are shaded in black and grey with orange-brown highlights on the snout and leaves, set within heavy black outlines against bare skin.

Traditional Shoulder Reptile Laurel Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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You will not believe what came off the 4.15 yesterday. A crate marked LIVE, with air holes bored in the lid by somebody who had clearly never bored a hole before, and inside it a six-foot alligator called Mr Gorringe, who belongs to a showman named Tobias Fenn. Fenn had lost him in a card game to the stationmaster at Hexham, and the stationmaster, being a sensible man, sent him straight on to the Newcastle zoo. Nobody told the alligator.

Walk with me to the platform. Mr Gorringe did not care for the crate. He put his head out through the gap in the slats, looked at me the way Mother looks at a bad hat, and opened his jaw to show all his teeth. The guard swore and the porters found reasons to be elsewhere. I was the only one who had been at the fair the week before, when Gorringe won the dog race at the back of the Hexham tent, so I was the one who knelt by the crate and talked to him.

I had a sprig of bay in my coat from Mrs Thwaite's kitchen garden, meant for the dinner table. I pushed it through the slats, round his head, and tucked the stem under his brow ridge. He went very still. Then he shut his jaw, slow as a gate, and let the leaves stay.

The zoo men signed for him at half past five and I am told he rode the last miles with his crown on, looking out of the crate like a magistrate. I expect they will take it off him by Thursday. Still, I thought you should know there is one alligator in Newcastle who has been crowned by a railway porter, and that I was the one who did it.

Write soon. Your loving brother, Jack