Small red and purple crab tattoo with dark outlines on the top of a bare foot, with grass in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small crab tattoo on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A small crab with a red body, red claws and dark purple legs and outline is tattooed on the top of a foot. The linework is bold and the colour is solid with little shading. The crab sits near the centre of the frame, with toes and grass visible around it.

Other Crab Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had the lobster pots half up the slipway when the crab came out of the third one, backing sideways with both claws raised like a boxer who had lost the fight before it started. Its body was the red of a pillar box after rain, and its legs were a dark plum colour that made me think of bruises on a knee. Mrs Tulley from the fish shed leaned over the wall to look and said red ones were rare off our bit of coast, and that rare things were either lucky or cursed depending on who was doing the counting.

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"A shilling at the Clifton," Dad said, tipping the pot so the seawater ran out across the stones. "Nobody pays more for a crab that's not worth eating." He was already reaching for the bucket, but I got there first and sat with it on my lap all the way up the lane, the crab shifting under the rim and clicking its claws against the tin every time the van hit a pothole.

I called him Sergeant, because he marched. On the Sunday, when the tide was at its lowest and the rocks past the harbour wall were lying open like a dropped wallet, I carried him out in the bucket and waded in up to my knees. Dad stood on the shingle with his hands in his pockets and said the sea would come back for its own, and I said I knew that, and I did.

The first claw to pinch me was the left one. I didn't let go. I just tipped the bucket over the pool and watched Sergeant scuttle sideways into the dark under a ledge of weed, red as a warning, then gone. The next summer a red shell turned up wedged in the weed by the slipway, and one of its claws had grown back smaller than the other. I didn't tell Dad. I let the tide have him.