Full arm sleeve tattoo of a pink axolotl with dotwork and geometric patterns, yellow circles and a flower bud, across the upper arm and forearm.

Axolotl full arm sleeve

Dotwork · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo runs from the shoulder towards the wrist, showing a pink axolotl-like salamander with black outlines and grey dotwork shading. Yellow and orange circles, a stylised flower bud at the top, and checkerboard and lattice patterns fill the spaces around the creature. The tattoo is photographed on a shirtless man's arm against a plain light background.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Circle Lattice Dot Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The creature had been in the bucket since Veracruz, and by the Azores the water had gone the colour of weak tea, but it still turned its feathery gills towards the lamp each night as if it were counting the lamps. Cook called it the Admiral. I called it nothing, because a man who names things at sea grows fond of them, and fondness is a poor thing to carry into a storm.

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We had taken it off a barge in the canals south of Mexico City, where a boy with a sack of marigolds sold it to Tomasz for two pesos and a cigarette. Tomasz swore it was the last of its kind, that the lake it came from had been drained for the city and the fish had nowhere left to go. I thought he was drunk. He was usually drunk by the dog watch, and by the time we raised the Mersey he had forgotten everything except the bucket, which he insisted on keeping under his bunk.

On the last night, off the Bar, the swell lifted us like a hand under a tray and the bucket slid across the deck and tipped. The creature lay on the wet boards, pale as a candle, and I expected the worst. Instead it crept, slow and deliberate, to the scupper where the rain was running, and pressed its small face into the water as though it meant to drink the whole Atlantic.

We docked at dawn. Tomasz wept into his cap. I carried the bucket down the gangway myself and tipped the creature into the dock pond behind the customs shed, where the water was brackish and grey. It sank, rose once with a ring of ripples spreading out across the surface, and then the harbour took it.