Colourful realistic tattoo of a leopard crouched through orange, blue and yellow paint-like washes on a forearm.

Leopard with watercolour wash on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A leopard with a long spotted tail is shown crouching low, with its head turned toward the lower edge of the design. The rosettes and fur are shaded in yellow, ochre and black, with fine detail around the face and whiskers. Loose orange, teal and blue washes sweep up behind the animal and along the tail, and a blue band runs across the bottom of the composition.

Realism Forearm Leopard Big cat Tail Spots Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the quay at Lowestoft believed me about the leopard, except old Stan Reddy, who had been drinking since the Friday tide and said he had seen one himself in 1961, sitting on the lock gate as if it paid the harbour dues.

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That October we sailed on the Mary Ellen before the light, three weeks of empty nets behind us. The mist lay on the water in flat blue sheets. I was coiling warp by the wheelhouse when I saw it on the breakwater, crouched low with its belly close to the stones, its spotted tail hanging over the edge and swinging slow as a rope in the tide. Its head was turned away from us toward the open sea, and the lamps from the fish market caught the ochre in its coat so it looked lit from inside.

Dennis, our skipper, didn't turn round. He said cats don't hunt the boats, they wait for what the sea gives back, and then he told me to stop gawping and get the boom rigged. We ran out past the Pell Bank. On the fourth haul the net came up so heavy the winch groaned and the whole deck shook with herring, silver and thrashing, more than the Mary Ellen had carried in a year.

We came back in on the slack tide with the hold full. The breakwater was bare. There were only wet pawprints on the stone, each one smaller than my palm, running down to the water and stopping at its edge, where the harbour light lay thin as a rinsed brush. Dennis looked at them a long time, then took off his cap, which I had never seen him do for anything.