Colour tattoo of the cartoon character Nelson Muntz saying Ha ha, set within a blue and orange geometric mandala on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nelson Muntz in a geometric mandala on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon figure with a smirking expression and a speech bubble reading Ha ha is set inside a circular medallion. The medallion has bold black outlines, layered blue, orange and white geometric petals, and a dotted gold ring around the figure. The solid colour fills are set against bare skin and grass, and the design is centred on the calf.

Neo-trad Geometric Calf Cartoon character Mandala Speech bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on your eleventh day at Hob's Skerry when the gull first laughs at you. It is a fat, pale-eyed herring gull with one bent foot, and it perches on the rail outside the lamp room the moment you drop the kettle lid. Ha ha, it says, flat as a dropped plate. You look round. There is nobody else for four miles of grey water, only the lens turning its slow petals of light across the sea.

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The log book is the first casualty. You write the weather in pencil, and the gull steals the pencil, then the sharpener, then your last digestive biscuit, each theft followed by that same bored laugh. Mainland radio crackles on Tuesdays with a man reading tide tables in a voice like a wet umbrella. You begin to talk to the bird the way you once talked to the boys on the school bus, which is to say you lose every argument and keep arguing.

On the twelfth night the fog comes in thick as porridge and the supply boat does not arrive. You climb the iron stairs to check the mantle and find the gull waiting on the gallery rail, wings hunched, the two of you the only things awake for miles. It watches you wipe the glass. You tell it, quietly, that you have nothing left to give. It tilts its head and does not laugh.

Then the beam sweeps out over the fog, catches the gull's pale chest, and throws its shadow huge across the water, a jagged star of petals hanging in the murk. Somewhere below, the boat's horn answers. You start to laugh first. The gull, for once, has nothing to say.