Colour tattoo of a yellow rubber duck wearing a white sailor hat and dog tags, sitting in a blue water splash on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rubber duck in sailor hat on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A yellow rubber duck wearing a white sailor hat and hanging dog tags sits in a light blue splash of water. The duck is shaded with soft highlights and grey outlines, giving it a rounded, three-dimensional look. The design fills the frame on a curved area of skin, with the water splash extending around the base.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The duck turned up in the lost property cupboard at Harrogate on a wet Tuesday, perched on top of a folded Puffa jacket as if it had booked the seat. Yellow as a traffic cone, a white sailor's hat tipped at a jaunty angle, and a set of dog tags on a steel chain, the stamped letters worn smooth by years of somebody's thumb. I logged it as one rubber duck, naval, slightly sea-worn, and put it on the top shelf where the umbrellas go to be forgotten.

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Nobody came for it. I checked the platform cameras, asked Gary on the barriers, and rang the depot at Leeds, who said they had never heard of a duck. Gary remembered a man on the 4.50 to York with a holdall that clanked when he ran for the train, but he couldn't say which pocket the duck had come out of. The tags were no help either. I could only make out a surname and a number, and the number belonged to nobody in the directory.

Three weeks later a woman in a green anorak came to the counter and asked, very politely, whether we had a duck. She said her grandad had bought it from a seaside stall in Whitby in 1961, named it Lieutenant Quackers, and taken it on every posting he ever had. He had died in the spring and she had been carrying the duck's empty spot in her head ever since. She didn't want it back, she said. She just wanted to know it had been looked after.

I gave her a cup of tea from the machine and told her it had been sitting on the top shelf with the best view. Now it lives on the windowsill of the office, facing the tracks. Every time a train pulls out, I nudge its hat straight, as if checking the line is clear for the next one.

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