Ink and watercolour flash design of a cross-legged mandrill in a meditation pose, framed by a rainbow arc and handwritten script, with no body placement shown.

Meditating mandrill with rainbow quote

Mixed · Flash

A cartoon mandrill sits cross-legged with its hands in meditation poses, its blue and orange face and white mane drawn in bold ink lines. Soft grey shading gives the body form, and watercolour washes of rainbow colour arc behind it, with handwritten script quotes along the curve and beneath the figure. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with drips of watercolour running down the lower edge.

Rainbow Script Quote Cartoon character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove and mind the crab pots, the tale is longer than the tide. There was a grey-cheeked mandrill came off a salt steamer at Wrenmouth in the winter of nineteen-eleven, in a crate meant for Bristol, and nobody ever sent him on. Old Hester Coyle took him in above the chandlery, and he sat on the breakwater every dawn after that, legs folded like a tailor's, palms turned up as if he was holding rainwater that wouldn't stay.

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The boys mocked him, the way boys do with anything that sits still. Then the Carrick brothers lost the Morwenna in a squall off the Stones, and their father came down the quay with a fish knife, shouting that the sea had taken what was his. The mandrill didn't move. He just tipped his painted chin towards the water and went on breathing, slow, slow, until the man's shoulders dropped and he sat down beside him on the wet stone.

After the squall there was a bow over the harbour, every colour you own, from red at the lighthouse end to violet over the mud flats. Hester asked him what all that sitting got him, and he said the hurt would come back whether he liked it or not, so the only choice was which way he faced it. Then he laughed, though I never heard him make a sound like that before or since.

They say the tide marks cut into his seat are still there, one notch for every winter he counted. And on the morning after a gale, if you go down early, you'll find a small boy sitting cross-legged on that same stone, hands open, watching the spray turn to colour.