Colour traditional-style tattoo of a green alligator head with open jaws, teeth and an orange outline, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green alligator head on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A green alligator head with an open mouth, white teeth and a dark outline sits on the lower leg, with its jaws and snout facing downward. An orange outline surrounds the head, and the teeth and eye are picked out in white and blue. The flat, bold colour fills and simple shading give the piece a traditional feel, centred on the leg with plain skin around it.

Traditional Calf Reptile Teeth Head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Reach would tell you when the gators came back, only that they had, and that the lock-keepers at Port Ruin had started painting their gates orange so the night pilots could see them coming. Mine was the last gate before the open water. I kept a logbook, a kettle and a brass hand-bell, and every dusk I rang it once for each barge that had cleared the channel.

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The one that came in on the thirteenth night was not a barge. It rode low and slow with its nose down, a green hull the length of a church, and its wake was streaked with rust. Through the spotlight I could see the bow was carved into a head, jaws wide, rows of white teeth as long as my forearm. Someone had ringed the whole thing in orange, like a warning or a halo. I threw the lever and the gate groaned open before my hand had thought about it.

The crew were three children and an old woman with a cracked voice, who asked for my name and then for the tide table, which I did not have. She sat on the foredeck and stroked the carved jaw as if it were a dog. It tastes the water first, she said. Then it decides. I asked what it had decided about the lock. She laughed and said nothing had been decided yet, that the gate was the decision, and I had made it for them.

Before dawn the boat backed into the channel, slow as breathing. I rang the bell once, out of habit, and the sound came back off that open mouth like a second bell. I still have the logbook. The entry for that night says only: passed, one head, jaws open.