Traditional colour tattoo of a crab with red, green and brown shading and bold black outlines, shown on a limb of pale skin.

Crab tattoo in traditional style

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A large crab is shown in a viewpoint from above, with two raised claws dotted with white and black spots, segmented legs and yellow-tipped eye stalks. The bold black outlines and solid fills of red, orange, olive green and teal are typical of traditional tattooing, with teal fan-shaped shading behind the claws and legs. The design fills most of the frame against a plain white background.

Traditional Other Crab Claw Leg Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Gull Point saw the crab arrive. They saw its claws first, two red things hooked over the lip of the bath in flat 14C, and Mrs Okonedo screamed, then went to fetch the broom, because that was what she did. The crab had come up the waste pipe from the car park, where the rain had stood since March, and it brought the smell of low tide with it.

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It was not a cruel crab, the old men on the stairwell agreed, only a stubborn one. It would not be swept out. It sat on the landing with its eyes on yellow-tipped stalks, turning them to watch the lift doors, and it would not go down. Every morning someone left a saucer of cold chips, and every morning the saucer was empty and the crab had shuffled a little closer to the lift. The children counted its legs. There were eight, and one of them had a yellow ring around it like a wedding band, which the Hall twins said was proof it had once belonged to somebody.

When the council sent men with a van, the van got as far as the bottom step. The crab climbed the stairs one at a time, claws raised like a man carrying two full buckets, and stopped at the fourteenth floor again. Nobody could lift it. It only wanted to see out, the old men said, so they propped the stairwell window open with a brick and let it sit there, looking across the grey river at the cranes.

By August the lifts were working and the crab was gone. The window was still propped. On the sill lay a single claw tip, speckled white and polished smooth as a pebble, and nobody ever moved it. Mrs Okonedo dusted around it every Thursday, and when anyone asked why, she said the sea had to send someone to check on the flats, and that the tip was the receipt.