Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monkey head with curling tail design

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn monkey head in side profile faces left, with a closed eye, a curved ear and a smiling mouth. A thick, tapering black line sweeps up over the head and down the back into a spiral tail that ends in small dots. The bold marker linework is drawn on lined notebook paper, with the lines visible behind the design.

Monkey Tail Spiral Dot Face

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the night porter at the Gull's Rest, and the monkey arrived on Thursday in a tea chest with a luggage label that read Return to Oddie's Travelling Fair, Dunmere. Mrs Pellow, who has run the house for thirty years on a policy of no pets and no whistling, took one look at its smile and said it could stay until the fair came back for it. Nobody has said when that will be.

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It takes the spiral banister for its own. By Saturday it has hung from the curtain pole in the front parlour, unpicked the lace from the cruet stand, and sat on the hall barometer so long the needle has started leaning towards Rain out of sheer embarrassment. You try to coax it down with a sultana. It takes the sultana, closes its eye as if you have just told it a joke you have not yet understood, and goes on sitting exactly where it is.

On the Sunday the tide turns at three and the fair folk have been gone since dawn, though nobody saw them leave. The monkey tugs at your sleeve, all cheek and patience, and leads you down the back steps onto the shingle. The carousel stands alone on the sand, its painted horses wet to the knee, and the wind works through the brass pole like a clock running backwards. The monkey climbs it, coils its tail round the top three times, and drops something into your palm. It is a brass ticket stamped with a spiral and a trail of small dots, and it still smells of the sea.

By breakfast the tea chest is empty except for a card in Mrs Pellow's careful hand: Room four is paid until further notice. Do not let the sultanas go to waste. You keep the ticket in your waistcoat pocket and listen for a whistle that never comes, though the barometer, you notice, has finally stopped leaning.