Realistic black and grey tattoo of a gorilla's head on a forearm, set against a pink and red wash of background ink.

Gorilla portrait on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A gorilla's head faces the camera, with fur rendered in fine, feathered black and grey strokes and the nose and brow modelled with smooth shading. Pink and red ink sits behind the animal, with a sleeve of other tattooing visible above it. The portrait fills the lower half of the frame, with the forearm curving through the image.

Realism Forearm Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishermen of Hallow Bay said the old male had come up out of the sea the winter the chapel bell cracked, though nobody on the island had ever seen him swim. He was grey at the shoulders and grey across the brow, and his fur stood up in feathers whenever the wind came off the water. He kept to the high terraces where the wild figs grew, and he ate what the birds left him.

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In the spring the mist came down for nine days and would not lift. On the fourth day Ruth Coyle's boy went up the goat path after a stray kid and did not come back. The men climbed with lanterns and shouted until their throats were raw, and the mist swallowed every shout. The old ape sat on the wall above the path with his heavy brow pressed low, watching them pass as though they were tradesmen who had come to the wrong door.

On the ninth morning the sun broke red over the ridge and lit the mist from behind, so the whole hillside glowed like a coal. The boy was sitting on a flat stone with the kid in his arms, and the ape sat beside him, close enough to touch, looking at the men coming up the path as if they were late for a bargain. Nobody on Hallow Bay ever asked him what he had charged. The figs that autumn were the sweetest anyone could remember, and the wall above the goat path was never mended, because nobody wanted to be the one who moved the stone the ape liked to sit on.