Black silhouette design of a girl holding a parasol while balancing on a tightrope above a crocodile rising from ripples in water.

Girl with parasol on a tightrope over a crocodile

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a girl in a full skirt and ruffled sleeves, holding an open parasol and balancing on a thin rope between two poles. Below her, a crocodile with a raised jaw and spiky back rises from concentric ripples in water. The design is flat black on a white background, with no shading or colour, and the figures are arranged in a tall vertical composition.

Girl Water Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Margate pier had ever seen Ada Pellow look down. The rope was thirty feet of tarred hemp strung between two iron posts, and the crowd liked her best when she kept her eyes on the bunting at the far end and her parasol open against a sky that had never once threatened rain. Her father had hammered the posts into the boards himself, the summer she turned nine, and he had taught her that a rope forgives a walker who keeps moving and nothing else.

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Beneath the boards lived Mr Gosse, a crocodile in a tank of brackish water that the showman swore had been taken from the Nile by a sailor hoping to win a wife. Every evening at the drum roll the great jaw rose out of the ripples, and the sixpenny crowd gasped as if it had never seen anything so dreadful. Ada had never believed the sailor story, but she believed the water. Mr Gosse was patient in the way that only things that can wait for years are patient.

One August evening the drum stopped halfway through its roll. The wind dropped, the tank went flat as a slate, and the crocodile sank without rising. Ada felt the rope go still under her boots. She closed the parasol, tucked it under one arm, and sat down on the wire with her skirts pooled around her knees. The crowd murmured. For the first time in her career she let herself look down.

The crocodile had lifted its head after all, not to snap but to watch her, the way a clerk watches a ledger he already knows is balanced. "Your turn, then," she told it. Then she stood, opened the parasol against nothing, and walked the last twelve feet to the far post while the ripples spread out under her and died against the tank's edge. When the drum started again, she was already shaking out her hem at the bunting, and nobody in the crowd thought to ask which of them had let the other go.