Back view of a woman in a white corset dress with a shaded grey chameleon tattoo on her upper back, its eye picked out in green.

Chameleon tattoo on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A shaded tattoo of a chameleon climbs across the upper back, curling its tail below the shoulder blade. The body is rendered in soft grey tones with darker outlining, and the eye is filled in green. The photograph is taken from behind, with the subject's curly hair and a white corset dress with teal lacing framing the tattoo.

Back Lizard Reptile Corset Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Hesketh the dyer kept his vats behind the chandler's on Mill Lane, and every morning he found the lizard asleep on the drying lines, flat as a dropped leaf. It had come up from the river in a crate of madder root and never gone back. He called it Tallow because it was the colour of nothing in particular, a grey that waited for whatever was nearest.

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All summer it took the blues from the indigo tubs, the rust from the madder and the yellow from the weld, and the town came to watch it crawl across a length of wool and go the same green as the water. Children dared each other to hold a pale cloth beside it. Hesketh grew fond of it and then uneasy, because his customers began asking for colours they could not name, and wanted them to hold still as they had been on the bolt.

In October a woman from the hill farms brought in a length of undyed silk and asked for teal, the green of the sea off Scarrow Point. Hesketh set the silk on the trestle and let Tallow walk onto it. The lizard went the length of the cloth, stopped at the far edge, and turned the grey of its own skin, no more and no less. Only its eye stayed green, the colour of the sea it had never once looked at.

Hesketh dyed the silk teal that night and hung it out to dry. In the morning the lizard sat on the top line with its tail curled, watching the cloth turn in the wind, and he left it there. Some things in a yard are only ever what they started as, and he thought the lizard had got it right.