Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Man in black tee with tattooed arms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A torso-and-arms shot of a man in a black short-sleeved t-shirt printed with a horned skull surrounded by tentacles, rendered in purple, green and yellow with a splattered finish. The tattoos on his forearms and upper arms are densely packed, with a mix of dark outlines and coloured fills, though individual motifs are hard to make out. The plain studio backdrop keeps the focus on the shirt and the arms.

Forearm Upper arm Skull Tentacle Horn Monster T-shirt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up in the nets on the Tuesday, horns first, tangled in a knot of rope that had once been somebody's mooring line. Maud Carrick hauled it over the gunwale with the gaff and it swung there, dripping, its jaw hung open as if it had been mid-sentence when the sea took it.

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Her brother Iain wanted it thrown back. The island had a habit of keeping what it took and handing back only the things it had finished with, and he said a horned skull was something finished with on purpose. Maud said nothing. She had seen the tentacles under the bone, pale ropes gone the colour of bruised plums, and they moved when the boat rocked, lazy, as if feeling for the gunwale.

That night she scrubbed the thing at the back of the net shed with carbolic and a stiff brush. The green came off the teeth in ribbons and the yellow ran into the drain like spilt paint. By dawn the tentacles had wound themselves around the hook on the wall, and there was a splatter of purple on the flagstones that no brush would lift.

Iain found her there at first light, sitting on an upturned creel with the gaff across her knees. 'It wants the water back,' she said. He looked at the hook, at the wet sheen on the skull, and at the sea beyond the door, which was perfectly flat and perfectly quiet. 'Then we give it the water,' he said, and went to fetch the boat.