Colour neo-traditional tattoo on a calf showing a woman on a tightrope holding an orange parasol, with willow leaves above and a green crocodile below.

Tightrope walker and crocodile on a calf

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman in a pale blue dress and lilac top balances on a tightrope under an orange parasol, with willow branches behind her. Below the rope, a green crocodile with an open jaw rises from the bottom of the design. Bold outlines and soft shading give the figures depth, and the palette of greens, lilac and orange is applied on a light, pale background.

Neo-trad Forearm Woman Umbrella

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope had been strung across the Marrow River since the spring fair, and Orla Tansy had walked it every evening for eleven days without once looking down. The crocodile beneath it was called Mister Cobb by the stable boys. It had come up from the delta with a travelling menagerie that went bankrupt at Hask, and nobody in the market town of Lesser Ondry had the money to ship it home. So it lived in the brown water below the willows and opened its jaws whenever the crowd clapped.

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Her mother had told her the trick was to fix her eyes on the far post and never on the water. Orla had kept to that. Her blue skirts were heavy with river damp, the lilac bodice pinched at the shoulders, and the orange parasol her grandmother had carried across this same rope forty years earlier was the only thing keeping the wind off her face. Tonight the wind came from the south and pushed. She felt the rope sing under her left foot.

Halfway over, the crocodile's jaws opened wider than they ever had, and a boy on the bank shouted. Orla did not look. She lifted the parasol higher, tilted it the way her grandmother had shown her, and let the wind fill the silk so that she drifted instead of fell. The crowd went quiet. Somewhere a bell rang for the lamps.

When she reached the post, Mister Cobb had shut his mouth and sunk back into the reeds, and the boy who had shouted was wiping his nose on his sleeve. Orla folded the parasol and the rope hummed behind her as if it had never been tested. Tomorrow, she decided, she would cross with the parasol furled, just to see what the river would do.