Realistic colour tattoo of an orange and black tarantula on the upper arm, with a cartoon-style tattoo partly visible below.

Realistic tarantula on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large tarantula is shown from above, with a dark body, orange-red banding on the legs and a textured, shaded abdomen. The spider has soft shading and fine detail on its hairy legs, giving it a three-dimensional look. It sits centrally on a bare arm against a red patterned sofa, with another coloured tattoo partly visible at the bottom of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Spider Leg Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last season the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Menagerie had a proper big top, the tent had more patches than canvas, and the only paying crowd was the Tuesday school party from Hull. I kept Ramona in a glass case at the back of the wagon, under a blanket that smelled of diesel and oranges. She was a Mexican red-knee, the colour of a fire going out, and in six years she had never bitten anyone who hadn't earned it.

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Old Teddy Halloran came to me in March with a biscuit tin of cash and a face like wet cardboard. "Sell her," he said, "or sell the wagon." I said neither. We argued over the tea urn until the kettle boiled dry, and then he wept into his sleeve about his father, who had bought the first lion in 1961 and never sold anything he loved.

So on the final night we drove to the car park behind the post office and set her on the bonnet of my old Morris, under a single sodium lamp. Children gathered in their dressing gowns. Ramona lifted her front legs, banded orange and black like the lacquered rails on the old ring, and the crowd went quiet the way a church does. A boy asked whether she got lonely. I told him she had plenty of company: the whole town, pressing its breath against the glass.

At dawn we loaded her back up. She climbed the ramp in her slow, careful way, stopping to test the ridge of the wood with each foot as if reading it. The circus was sold to a man from Leeds who wanted the wagon for a fish stall. Ramona went to the school in Hull, where she still lives in a tank by the window. Sometimes letters arrive in crayon, asking after her legs.