Neo-traditional colour tattoo on the upper arm of a panda head with open jaws over a skull, with bamboo stalks and red blood splatter.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Panda and skull with bamboo on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A panda's head with its jaws open sits over a cracked skull, with red blood splatter and thorny red shapes around the mouth. Bamboo stalks and green leaves fill the background and lower edge. Bold black outlines, smooth colour shading and vivid greens, reds, yellows and whites make up the design, which is framed across the upper arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Panda Skull Blood Leaves Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The panda had been off its bamboo for a week, the keeper said, so Dennis Okafor had been sent to sit up with it through the small hours and ring through if its breathing changed. He carried a torch, a flask of tea he had no intention of drinking and the logbook, which was already full of the words nothing to report. The bamboo stalks lay stacked by the gate, green and untouched, and beyond them the rockwork was quiet in the way that made a man listen.

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Then came the crack, dry and deliberate, like a biscuit snapped in a fist. He found Bramble on the wooden platform with the education hut's old specimen skull between its jaws. The skull had sat in the hut's glass case since 1971, labelled Mr Pell, carnivore, donated by a nephew who had never once visited. The panda had prised the case open through the vent flap, and it looked up at Dennis with pale, unbothered eyes, blood dark along its muzzle as if someone had painted it on in a hurry.

"Right," Dennis said. "That's not on the menu." He had expected to feel afraid. Instead he felt the strange patience of a man who had been awake too long to be surprised. He crouched, slid the flask across the boards and set a bamboo stalk beside the skull, slowly, the way you'd offer a dog a stick. Bramble considered it, then lowered the skull and took the green stalk instead, chewing with a sound like a tired crowd applauding.

At six the keeper arrived to find the hut case shattered, the panda asleep in the sun and Dennis writing in the logbook. Under nothing to report he had written: skull returned to the bamboo, Pell's nephew to be informed. He did not expect anyone to believe him, and he was not entirely sure he believed it himself.