Realistic colour tattoo of a smoking caterpillar beside a brass hookah, in teal and orange, wrapping around a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Caterpillar with hookah on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large caterpillar creature with a wrinkled face and antennae-like tendrils rests beside an ornate brass hookah with an orange hose. The shading is smooth and detailed, with teal and blue tones dominating the body and a soft smoky background. The design is repeated across the limb, with the orange hose and hookah providing warm accents against the cool palette.

Realism Forearm Smoke Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Blue Lantern closed at two, but the gentleman in the corner booth never left before the last record had stopped turning. He came every Thursday with his brass hookah, which he set on the table like a small lighthouse, and he drew on its orange hose until the room filled with smoke the colour of the sea at dusk. Nobody danced with him. Nobody dared. I was the cloakroom girl that winter, and I had been told the coat he hung on the peg was too heavy for one person to lift.

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On the third Thursday of February he caught me staring. 'You're counting my legs,' he said, and I said I was counting the rings on the hose, which was true. There were eleven, one for every Thursday he had sat there since the war. He laughed, a sound like paper tearing slowly, and asked if I wanted to learn the foxtrot. I said I did not dance with customers. He said he was not a customer, he was the reason the floor was sprung.

So I danced with him, badly, while the band played something slow and Mr Pell at the piano kept his eyes on his hands. The old fellow moved like a long coat being shaken out, all folds and patience, and his face in the blue light was kind and crumpled as a letter read too often. 'Every dance costs a little of you,' he told me, 'and every hose gives something back.' I did not understand him then.

When the lamps went out I found the hookah cold on the table and the booth empty, except for a single curl of smoke above the seat and a brass ring on the cloth with eleven marks worn into it. I took it home in my glove. I still have it. On Thursdays I put the kettle on and listen for the band, and I think, quite seriously, that the floor is still sprung.