Colour traditional-style tattoo on the back of a caterpillar smoking a pipe on a red spotted mushroom, with purple-edged leaves behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Caterpillar smoking on a red mushroom

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A cartoon green caterpillar with a cross expression sits on a red mushroom with white spots and a yellow ornament on its stem, exhaling smoke from a long pipe that curves down to the mushroom. Purple-edged leaves frame the design on the left and top. The bold dark outlines and flat colour fills give it a cartoon look, and the design sits against lightly lit skin.

Traditional Back Mushroom Pipe Smoke Leaves Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trust sent me to Crane Hollow Keep with a clipboard, a tape measure and a budget for one month of repairs, and the first thing I found in the herb garden was a caterpillar holding court on a toadstool. He was green, about the length of my forearm, and he wore the expression of deep disappointment I had come to expect from anyone who had ever stood beneath the north wall.

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'Nine feet and four inches,' he said, before I had opened my mouth. 'The breach. It has been nine feet and four inches since the reign of somebody with a fondness for ducks.' He drew on a long pipe whose stem curled down to the mushroom's cap, and a ring of smoke drifted up past the broken arch, where ivy had already begun knitting the stones together without asking anybody's permission.

I measured it. He was right, which I resented. The trust wanted a figure they could print in a glossy leaflet, and the caterpillar offered a bargain: he would tell me which stones carried the weight if I wrote, in my report, that the garden was not to be weeded. I agreed, because my budget had a hole in it and so, it turned out, did the wall.

The board cut the masons and kept the nettles. A week later a dock leaf arrived in the post, folded around a single line in pencil: Nine feet and four inches, still. Nothing had changed, and that, he said, was the whole art of a ruin.