Small fine line lizard tattoo with a crescent moon and sun on the back of a hand, beside a black leather watch strap.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lizard, moon and sun on the back of a hand

Fine line · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A small lizard, possibly a gecko or skink, lies diagonally across the back of a hand, shaded in muted green and grey with fine detail on its scales and tail. A crescent moon and a sun outline sit beside its head in dark grey, drawn with delicate linework and dotted shading. The hand rests on a weathered wooden table, with a black leather watch strap visible at the wrist.

Fine line Hand Lizard Moon Crescent moon Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit close, you lot, the stove's only just caught. This is about the skink that rode the Marigold from Gloucester to Worcester the summer the river ran low, and the man daft enough to bet his tea on it.

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Tobias Crane kept the Marigold's tiller and a ledger in which he wrote every lock, every lift bridge and every load of Cotswold stone. The skink came aboard at Sharpness, a grey little thing no longer than a wet match, and took to the warm boards beside the stove. Crane called it Almanac, because it always seemed to know the hour without a clock. Each dusk, before the lamps were lit, it climbed to the gunwale and stared west, and when the moon came up pale over the water, Almanac turned its head to watch that too.

The bet was struck in the Anchor at Upton. A bargee called Ruddock swore the creature was a thief and that nothing so small could keep still through a lock-keeper's shouting. Crane wagered his week's tea against Ruddock's whole cabin of brass fittings. At the lock below Diglis the keeper bellowed, the paddles groaned, and Almanac did not shift an inch from the rail. It sat there with the low sun on its back and the thin crescent of the evening moon above the weir, as if it were checking the pair of them against each other.

Ruddock paid up without a word. Years later, Crane's granddaughter found the ledger, and the last entry in his crabbed hand read only: Almanac went ashore at Worcester and did not come back to the boat. I have my own notion where it went. I think it is still lying on some warm sill, waiting for the hour to come round.