Two photos of a traditional style tattoo on an upper leg or arm, showing a brown creature with an open toothed mouth and eyes on stalks above red flowers and green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open-mouthed creature with red flowers

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a brown, hooded creature with a wide open mouth, a red tongue and rows of teeth, with a dark, wavy mass behind it and small eyes on stalks. Below sit three red flowers with dark centres and green leaves. The left photo shows bold black outlines and colour fills, while the right photo is a different angle that shows mostly greyed shading on the creature with the red flowers still in colour.

Traditional Other Creature Teeth Tongue Eye Flower Leaves Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thing in the bog behind our cottage on Hallan had a hood like a wet sail and a mouth it kept open for the weather. Mam said it was only a heron's ghost, but herons do not keep their teeth in rows, and they do not blink on stalks. I was nine the summer I went looking for it with a jar of cold tea and a tin of boiled sweets, because Ewan Gunn had told the whole school it would eat any child who said their prayers backwards.

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I found it at the edge of the iris beds, where the red flowers grow wild in the wet and the old women call them bloodwort. Its hair was black and full of weed, lifting and settling as if it breathed under water. It saw me with two eyes on stalks, then two more, and I thought of every lie I had ever told: the broken slate, the ferry fare I spent on bull's-eyes, the time I said the dog had run off. The mouth opened wider than my whole head. Its tongue was as red as the flowers, and when it spoke it used my own voice.

It did not eat me. It asked for one true thing instead. I gave it the sweets, and it took them one by one, careful with its teeth, and ground the papers down into the peat. Then it told me I could go home, but only if I left one lie behind in the bog. So I left the one about the slate, and by morning there was a ring of red flowers along the path where I had stood.

Ewan's dog went missing that winter and came back with its ear torn, and nobody on Hallan has said a prayer backwards since. When the tide is low I still walk out to the iris beds with a tin of sweets in my coat pocket, not to feed the thing, but to tell it the truth.