Red and orange sunset wash on the upper arm and shoulder with black silhouettes of savanna animals and a flying bird, in a colour tattoo.

Savanna sunset silhouettes on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A red and orange sunset wash fills the upper arm and shoulder, with a row of black silhouetted animals standing along a dark ground band at the lower edge. A single bird flies above the animals, and a soft grey shadow sits beneath the silhouettes. The sky uses loose, streaked colour shading, while the silhouettes are solid black with clean edges.

Upper arm Shoulder Sunset Silhouette Animal Bird Lion Giraffe Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spare was already on the verge when the first lioness walked out of the scrub, and I remember thinking how unhurried she was, as if the road belonged to her and I was the thing in the way. Behind her came two cubs tumbling over each other, then an old male with a torn ear who stopped dead and studied my lorry as though he were reading the number plate. Dad always said never to get out of a vehicle near dark, and I had promised him that at the depot yard, but the jack was seated and the sun was going fast.

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The sky over the Karoo had turned the colour of a struck match, orange bleeding into red, the flat ground swallowing the light until only the gold stayed on the tops of the thorn bushes. I kept one hand on the door handle and the other on the wheel nut and counted the animals as they crossed in front of the headlights. Eleven, twelve, a mother with a limp and a little one that kept stopping to look back at me. Last of all came a giraffe, bending its long neck down to the lone acacia as if it were checking the ground for something it had dropped.

A bird came in low from the east and settled on the dead branch above the giraffe's head. It had a hooked beak and a way of holding its wings out like a cloak, and it watched me the whole time I wrestled the wheel on. I didn't have a name for it then and I still don't.

When I finally switched on the engine, the lions were gone and the giraffe was a dark stroke against the last of the light. Only the bird was left, unmoved, on its branch. I drove off with the window down, and in the mirror the road behind me looked like it had never been crossed at all.