A small brown puppy with a red collar held in a hand on a tattooed forearm, which carries a colourful traditional-style design, against a plain grey background.

Puppy held on a tattooed forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tattooed forearm, seen from the wrist to the elbow, holds a young brown puppy with a red collar in cupped hands. The forearm tattoo has bold outlines and multicoloured ink in red, green, blue and yellow, with a reptilian or bird-like motif visible. The plain grey backdrop keeps the focus on the puppy and the arm.

Forearm Dog Collar Hand Bird Reptile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fire and listen, for the old ones say the wind over Carrow Ford carries more than dust. In the kingdom of Hollin Vale, where the rivers ran backwards on Thursdays, there lived a wyvern called Sallow who kept the ferry across the Ashmere. She was painted the colours of a fever: green scales gone blue at the throat, a crest of red feathers, and eyes like two lemons left on a sill. Nobody paid her in coin. They paid in favours, and the favour she liked best was something small to carry.

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One autumn a shepherd's daughter came down to the water with a brown pup under her arm, a runt with a red ribbon knotted at its neck. The pup had been promised to the Thane's hounds and would be drowned at first light if it stayed on the near bank. She asked the wyvern to take it over before the gate shut at dusk. Sallow looked at the child, then the pup, then the sky going the colour of old brass. She folded one wing down like a plank and lifted the little animal into her talons with a care that astonished everyone who had ever seen her eat a goat whole.

The crossing was long that evening. The river pulled at the keel and the lamps of the Thane's tower blinked behind them like accusing eyes. Halfway over, the pup stopped whimpering and began to chew the edge of a talon, which Sallow permitted without comment. When they reached the far bank she set it down in the reeds. The pup shook itself, sneezed at the mist, and trotted off after a stick as if it had never been afraid of anything in its life.

The girl asked what she owed. Sallow pulled the ribbon loose with her beak, tied it into her crest among the red feathers, and turned back toward the lamps. The ferrymen of Hollin Vale still say that a wyvern with a scrap of red in her crest is a creature who has settled a debt in dogs, and that no toll on the Ashmere has ever been half so fair.