Colour neo-traditional tattoo on a calf of a woman in a green dotted dress holding a pink parasol on a tightrope, with an alligator rising from water below.

Parasol tightrope walker and alligator on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a full green dress with a pink parasol walks along taut tightrope lines across the leg. Below her, a realistic alligator with an open jaw rises from rippled water, drawn with soft grey shading. The mostly colour palette uses pink, green and purple, with bold outlines and a clear, centred composition.

Neo-trad Realism Calf Woman Dress Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire was rigged at six, the way Vera Lusk liked it, and the platform at Hallam Junction was still wet from the night's rain. Porters stopped with their barrows to watch her tie the parasol to her wrist. Below the footbridge the goods yard had been flooded for a week, and in the brown water the alligator the show called Duchess lay with only her eyes and the knuckles of her snout showing.

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"She'll not move for a crowd," said Teddy Marsh, who had carried the cases up from Leeds. "Wait till she's bored of looking at you." Vera shook her head. The show had been sold to a man in Blackpool who wanted the act finished by Saturday, and the wire ran forty yards from the signal box to the water tower, humming whenever the 4.10 rattled through beneath it.

She stepped out in her green dress with its white daisies and let the wind take the hem. Halfway across the wire dipped under her weight, the water shivered, and the alligator turned her head to watch the way a landlady watches a lodger who is late with the rent. Vera counted her steps aloud, as her father had taught her, one for each sleeper of the track below. At the twelfth she stopped and looked down.

"Morning, Duchess," she said. The jaw opened slowly, and the whistle of the 4.10 came up the valley. Vera laughed, opened the pink parasol, and stepped onto the far rail just as the train threw its light across the flood. The crowd cheered, Teddy swore, and the alligator sank back into the water as if a long-standing debt had finally been settled.