Colour tattoo of a cartoon character with yellow eyes and horns, coiled around a red tail, with the quote What fun is there in making sense? on the calf.

Cartoon character and quote on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon character with yellow eyes, green-grey features, horns and a clawed hand curls around a long red serpentine tail with blue feathered wings and a scalloped edge. The black-outlined, flat-coloured linework sits beside the black lettering of the quote, which runs in a diagonal across the upper calf. The palette is mainly green, yellow, red, blue and orange on pale skin, with the figure framed by a dark arc.

Traditional Calf Cartoon character Dragon Serpent Quote Lettering Horn Wing Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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You will not believe what came through Halsey Lock on Tuesday. Mr Pell swore it was a barge full of eels until the thing put its head over the gate and asked him, very politely, whether he had considered that the river might be running uphill. He had not. Now he will not go near the lower gate, and the whole village is calling it the sour dragon, though it looked more like a goat that had been caught in a thunderstorm and enjoyed it.

It stayed three days. It stole the bargemen's tea and replaced it with something green and fizzing that made Mrs Odell sneeze gold coins for an afternoon. It told the vicar his sermons had been wrong since 1840 and offered to correct them with a cartwheel. Father laughed so hard he had to sit on the lock beam, and I think it was the first time I have heard him laugh since Mother.

On Thursday it asked me what the use of a lock was, if the water always finds its own level. I said that was the point, that some things need keeping in their place. It wrapped its long red tail round my ankle, wagged a claw at me and said that was exactly the sort of sense it could not abide. Then it winked and was gone, the gates swung open on their own, and the river ran the wrong way to Marlow for a full minute.

I have kept the scalloped feather it left on the towpath. I do not understand it, and I suspect I am not meant to. Come home at Christmas and bring your sense, but leave room in your bag for a little nonsense.

Your sister, Edie