Traditional style tattoo of a reptile head with spiny ridges and clawed forelimbs on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Reptile head on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

A reptilian creature head with spiky dorsal ridges, clawed forelimbs and a segmented neck is centred on the back of a hand. Bold black outlines contain olive green, grey and yellow fills with darker shading for depth. Two cropped forearm tattoos in red, yellow and black appear at either side of the frame.

Traditional Hand Reptile Dinosaur Creature Spike Claw Eye Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reed-cutters of Tawen Mere said the beast under the sedge was not asleep, only waiting for the water to turn. Its back was ridged like a stack of broken oars, its neck was jointed like a row of millstones, and its one eye was yellow as a tallow lamp. Nobody crossed the third bend after dark. When Ammet's daughter Sella went out at dusk to set her eel traps and did not come home, her father stood on the bank and shouted her name until the moon came up over the fen.

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At first light a grey heron stood on the mud by his boots. It spoke in the voice of the marsh, which is the voice of water moving through roots. "Your girl is with me," it said, "and I have no use for her. Bring me the thing you love least and I will open the gate." Ammet thought of his boat, his knife, his bad knee. He thought of the brass bell his wife had hung on the eel-house, which had rung every morning since she died and which he had always wished would stop. He carried the bell down to the water.

The beast came up out of the reeds to meet him, slow as a sluice gate lifting. It took the bell in one clawed foreleg and turned it over, listening. Then it lowered its head until its yellow eye was level with his own. "You fool," it said, not unkindly. "I only wanted to know whether anyone would bring me anything." Sella walked out of the sedge behind it, muddy to the knees, her basket still on her arm. The beast sank back into the water and the mere went flat and quiet.

Ammet hung the bell back on the eel-house that evening, and it rang the next morning as it always had. He never again wished it silent. On the third bend, if you go at low water, you can still see a ridge of dark scales breaking the surface, and a yellow light opening and closing under the reeds, as if something is listening for a bell.