Traditional style colour tattoo of a green crocodile coiled around an upper arm with yellow flowers and dark leaves, shown in three side-by-side views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crocodile and flowers on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A crocodile with an open jaw and teeth is wrapped around the arm, with its body covered in teal and green scale patterns picked out in yellow dashes. Yellow flowers with dark centres and dark spiky leaves fill the spaces around the body. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the image shows three angled views of the same tattoo against a dark background.

Traditional Upper arm Reptile Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The crocodile came up out of the mangrove channel the week after the boat failed to return, and it has not gone back. Father says it is only hungry and will move on with the spring tides, but it has coiled itself round the cistern on the north side of the station like a rope somebody forgot to coil, its jaw open just far enough that the gulls think better of landing on it. Mrs Pell brings the goats round the long way now.

I have been feeding it the mackerel Tom catches off the breakwater. It takes them from my hand without any fuss, which I am not proud of. Its scales are the green of the lagoon at noon, and someone, God knows who, has picked them out with little yellow dashes, like the stitching on Mother's quilt that she never finished. When the light comes low they look like a field of cut barley laid flat on the water.

Last Sunday the flowers appeared. Yellow ones with dark, round middles, pushed up between the coils and along the cistern wall where nothing grew before. Tom swears the crocodile dragged them up from the bottom of the channel. I think it is more likely the rain. Either way I found five on the step this morning, each one with its black eye looking up at me, and I have pressed them in the back of the logbook where Father will not look.

Come at Michaelmas if the packet still runs. Bring thread. I want to see if I can make the yellow dashes stay put once it moves on.

Yours, Nell