Colourful tattoo on a calf showing a figure in a grey suit and striped tie, with a ram skull head, a coffee cup and paint splashes above.

Suited figure with ram skull head on calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A grey-suited figure with a ram skull in place of its head stands at the centre of the design, holding a coffee cup in one hand. Shading in soft greys defines the suit and skull, while bright splashes and drips in red, yellow, green, blue and purple spread upward and downward from the head. The design fills the centre of a lower leg against a plain turquoise background.

Calf Suit Horn Coffee cup Paint splash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry to Skerra leaves at ten past seven, whatever the weather and whatever the skipper's porridge situation, so I am always on the slip before the gulls. I run the booking office from a hut the size of a telephone box, wearing the grey suit my aunt bought for a funeral that never happened. The ram's skull on my shoulders came from a dealer in Stornoway who swore it had once been a champion. Nobody on Hallan has ever questioned it. Ferries do not care what a man looks like, only whether his ticket is in order.

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The trouble started in March, when the paint lorry overturned at the causeway and two hundredweight of pigment went into the harbour. The whole island came out to gawp. Mrs Ennis from the bakery said the colours had been sent to punish us for voting the wrong way on the pier. I thought it was simply the sea being showy. By teatime the spray had crept up my collar, and by morning a fountain of reds, greens and a purple I could not name was bursting up from where a head should have been, like a firework that had lost its nerve halfway.

Duncan, the skipper, would not take my ticket. He said a man who sold passage ought to be able to see the passengers. So I picked up my coffee cup, the way I always do, and walked down the slip to the water. The drips ran off my jacket into the tide, and the boat, for the first time in forty years, came in early to meet me. I stepped aboard without a ticket, and nobody asked for one, because the colours had got there first and everyone could see exactly where I was going.

We left at ten past seven. Behind us the harbour wall was streaked with rainbows where the paint had run, and the gulls came down to lap at it. I still do the bookings. Now there is a queue on the slip before the gulls, people with their hands out, asking for a seat on the crossing where the colour comes from.