Black ink flash drawing of a chameleon with swirling blackwork patterns along its body and a tightly curled tail, on a white background.

Chameleon with swirling patterns and curled tail

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A chameleon in profile faces left with its tail curled into a spiral at the bottom. Its body is filled with flowing black and white swirls and marbled linework, with the tail segments decorated with rounded panels and dots. The drawing is in black ink on white paper and is centred with plenty of empty space around it.

Blackwork Lizard Swirl Reptile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys came in at half four with the oven already ticking and found the cardamom crate open. Something had climbed out of it and was clinging to the proving cupboard door, a chameleon no longer than her hand. It had turned the colour of the wet flour on the bench. Mr Halloran, who owned the place and had opinions about anything that moved, wanted it gone before the first van arrived. Dilys did not want to frighten it, so she set a saucer of water beneath the hook and went back to the marbling.

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She worked cocoa into the rye, pulling and folding until the dark ran through the pale in lines like wind over barley. Every few minutes she checked the shelf. The lizard came down it one careful step at a time, its tail uncurling and coiling again on the edge of a tray. Each time she looked, its back had changed, the swirls sliding across it the way the dough moved under her palms. By the time the sky over the car park went grey, it had matched the loaves so closely that she could not tell which was which until it blinked.

She shaped the last batch into spirals, tucked the tails under, and scored them with the blade she used for Sunday bloomers. When the van came, the driver lifted the empty crate, looked at the saucer of water and a single curled leaf, and shrugged. Mr Halloran sniffed at the rye, pronounced it too dark, and bought four loaves anyway.

Dilys kept the one with the tightest spiral back for herself. At lunch she turned it over in her hands and noticed that the marbling on its crust had shifted since morning, as if something underneath had decided on a new pattern.