Traditional style colour tattoo of a striped caterpillar crawling along a black branch with red, yellow and pink flowers and green leaves, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Caterpillar on a flowering branch on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A caterpillar with a black spiky body, orange and yellow segments and pink dots crawls along a black branch. The branch carries three five-petalled flowers in red, yellow and pink, plus green leaves with dark outlines. Bold black outlines, flat fills and solid colour give it a classic old-school look, shown against smooth skin on the forearm.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Branch Flower Leaves Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ronnie,

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The caterpillar is still on the windowsill in the jam jar with the holes punched in the lid, and Mr Pryce from the chemist's says it is a garden tiger, which I told him was a very grand name for something so bristly. It has eaten the whole blackthorn sprig you cut for me before you left, then the bramble I fetched from the bottom of the lane in my slippers. I have given up trying to put it outside. Every time I open the back door it turns its head at me like a clerk being interrupted.

The Hollis girl wants it for the nature table at school, and Mrs Ashdown from the chapel says it is unlucky to bring a grub indoors before the harvest is in. I said the harvest was in twenty years ago in this village and nobody had noticed. The little sprigs of flower you pressed into the jar have gone brown at the edges, but the red ones still look almost cheerful, and the caterpillar seems to prefer them to the leaves. It has grown so fat that its stripes have gone soft and pink, and it has stopped eating altogether.

This morning I found it had climbed out of the jar and settled itself on the yellow flowers I'd left on the kitchen table, as though it had decided for itself where it wanted to be. I didn't move it. I have put the kettle on and left the window open a crack so the wind can come in from the allotments, and I am writing this with one hand on the pen and the other resting on the table near it. Come home when you can. Whatever it turns into, I want you to see it before it goes.

Your loving mother, Edith