Colourful watercolour-style forearm tattoo of a cartoon penguin wearing blue headphones, with a rainbow splash and music notes rising above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Penguin in headphones with rainbow music notes

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cartoon penguin sits at the bottom of the forearm, wearing blue headphones and shaded in soft grey with orange feet and beak. Above it, a rainbow splash in red, orange, yellow, green and blue rises up the arm, with small black music notes and a treble clef scattered through the colour. The soft, blended edges of the splash contrast with the outlined, shaded penguin, and the photo is taken straight on against a plain background.

Forearm Penguin Music note Treble clef Rainbow Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs officer at Harrow Quay had already stamped three gulls, a crate of herring and one very damp accordion before the penguin reached her desk. Pim stood on the wooden counter with his headphones clamped over his ears and a battered cassette player strapped to one flipper, nodding along to something only he could hear.

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"Anything to declare?" said Mrs Ottley, tapping the counter with her biro. Pim didn't answer. He was humming, and the hum came out in colour: a smudge of red spread across his passport, a yellow curl drifted toward the ceiling, and a blue note stuck to the window like wet paint. Mrs Ottley had worked the border for twenty-two years and had never once seen paperwork turn rainbow.

She lifted one earcup. Tinny brass spilled out, a ukulele and a chorus of gulls, and something in her shoulders gave way. "Where's that from, then?"

"Nowhere you can get a visa for," Pim said. "It's the noise the ice makes in March, just before it lets go."

She listened longer than the queue liked. Then she stamped his passport with a small black treble clef, slid it back across the counter and tapped her own foot twice on the floor. "Go on, then. Mind the tide. And turn that thing up before the next lot get here." Pim saluted with a flipper, and the colours followed him down the gangway like a ribbon nobody had asked for.