Realistic colour tattoo of a crocodile with open jaws emerging from water and reeds across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crocodile emerging from reeds on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A realistic crocodile head with its teeth bared rises from dark water, with its eye and scaled snout visible above the surface. Fine shading and speckled texture give the skin depth, and the reeds in the foreground are drawn in streaks of grey and green. Warm orange and muted green tones dominate the colour palette against a dark background.

Realism Upper arm Water Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still and keep your hands off that railing, because the iron is older than your nan and it remembers every hand that ever gripped it. Now. The canal behind Carrow House was dug to carry coal, and when the coal ran out the men left the water to go green and quiet. Nobody swam there. Nobody fished. The reeds grew up over the towpath until you could walk right past the bank and never see it.

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That was where the crocodile lived, the summer the pigeons went missing from the roof. Mrs Okafor on the ninth floor swore she heard it breathing under her window at night, a long slow sound like a bellows being pulled. The council sent a man in a yellow jacket to measure the water. He came back the next morning with his trousers wet to the knee and wouldn't say what he'd seen, only that the reeds were bending the wrong way against the wind.

Here is the part your mothers don't like. A boy named Terry Lacey went down with a bag of bread to prove the old men wrong. He stood on the lip of the bank, tearing crusts, and the water went flat as a plate. Then the snout came up out of the dark, orange as a lamp in the mist, with its eye open and its teeth set in a grin like a rusted gate. Terry didn't run. He held out the last crust, very politely, and said good evening.

And the crocodile took it and went back down, and that's the whole story. Terry grew up, drove a van for the council, and never once fed a pigeon in his life. So if you hear something breathing under your window tonight, don't go looking. Just say good evening.