Colour tattoo of a cuttlefish with grey and black banded mantle and brown tentacles on the outer calf, photographed from behind with the knees visible.

Cuttlefish tattoo on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A cuttlefish is shown in profile, facing down and to the left, with a striped grey and black mantle and a fin along its top edge. Its eye, arms and tentacles are drawn in brown and orange with soft shading. The tattoo sits on the outer calf against a blurred outdoor background of greenery and a wooden barrel.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and let me tell it properly, because nobody in this room got it right the first time. You'll remember the tank in Mr Hollis's lab, the one with the bubbler that rattled like a bad chest. The cuttlefish in it came in the bottom of Eddie Fairweather's coat, wrapped in a bag of mussels he'd nicked off the fish quay.

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It was striped grey and black like a deckchair left out in the rain. When Hollis walked past the glass it went pale as a dinner plate. When Ruth Carrow stood there with her lunch, it flushed brown and orange, the exact shade of her Friday cardigan. Hollis swore it was a fault in the glass. Eddie swore nothing at all, which is how we knew he was lying.

Then the summer the tank cracked, the creature went missing. We searched under the benches, in the sink traps, behind the boiler where the mice lived. Hollis pinned a notice to the door. Three weeks later the caretaker found a smear of ink on the harbour steps and a line of little suckers leading straight down into the green water. Eddie said it had gone home. Nobody laughed, because he'd never once said anything he didn't mean.

So Eddie lifted his glass tonight to nothing in particular, the way you would to a teacher, and said nothing at all, which is how we knew he was telling the truth this time.

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