Traditional colour tattoo of a green crocodile head with a red and yellow eye and open jaws on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crocodile head on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A crocodile head in profile, shown with its jaws open and teeth bared, fills the forearm. Bold black outlines define the scales, teeth and spots, with shaded green, teal and yellow tones across the head. A red eye and red mouth interior, with orange accents, stand out against the skin, and the background is a dark leather chair.

Traditional Forearm Reptile Eye Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reed boats were already gone by the time you reached the bank, so you waited in the mud with a basket of salted fish on your hip and listened to the river talk to itself. Nobody crossed at dusk. Your uncle had said so for thirty years, and his father before him, and the crocodile that lay in the shallows below the sycamores had grown from rumour into something like a magistrate, the one who decided who went over and who did not.

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It was not the teeth you noticed first when the head lifted. It was the eye, a single ring of red, bright as a lamp someone had left burning in a house with nobody home. The jaws opened slowly, the way a door opens in a dream, and the inside of the mouth was the colour of a poppy. You understood then that it had been waiting for someone who would not run.

So you did not run. You set the basket down, took out the largest fish, and held it up to the water. "My mother is on the far side," you said, though your voice shook like a reed. "She is sick, and the physician is waiting with the medicine she needs. I am not asking you to carry me. I am asking you to let me pass."

The river was quiet for a long time. Then the creature sank without a ripple, and the water around your ankles went cold, and a dark shape drifted toward the far bank as if it had been sent ahead to clear the road. You waded across with the fish still under your arm. Behind you the surface settled, and the red eye stayed open a moment longer, watching you go, the way a ferryman watches a fare he has decided to forgive.