Sketch-style tattoo of a green chameleon with a curled tail on a forearm, with black linework and a watercolour green wash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green chameleon sketch on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A chameleon clings to a branch with its head turned upward and its curled tail wrapped at the bottom of the design. Loose black linework outlines and shades the body, with rough, sketched strokes extending beyond the edges. Green watercolour washes fill the head and body, with yellow-green highlights and small splashes of colour across the composition.

Forearm Lizard Branch Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chameleon had ridden on the dashboard since Tonopah, a hand-sized thing with a curled tail, and somewhere past the dry lake it had turned the colour of the sagebrush along the verge. Uncle Ray had won it in a card game behind a motel, handing it over with a jam jar of crickets and the look of a man passing on a debt. "Don't let it sit in the sun," he said. "And don't let it think you're a tree."

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Now the road ran ahead of me like a ruler laid across the desert, heat lifting off the tarmac in sheets. I talked to the creature when the radio died out. I told it about the hospital in Reno, the nurse who called Ray stubborn, the way the car still smelt of his tobacco though he'd quit in April. It swivelled one eye towards me and kept the other on the horizon, as though it had its own map and didn't much trust mine.

At the petrol station in Hawthorne it crawled onto the gear stick and wrapped its tail twice around the knob, and I understood it would sooner stay in the car than go back in the jar. I bought two bottles of water and a postcard I never sent. When I came back it had moved to my sleeve, and the green had drained out of it, leaving only grey, like silt on a riverbank.

By the time we reached the coast the air smelt of salt and I had stopped pretending I was driving anywhere. I pulled onto a gravel shoulder above the sea, lifted the creature onto a stunted pine, and watched its tail uncurl slowly, a loose ribbon in the wind. Then it turned the colour of the spray and was gone.