Sketch-style tattoo of a monkey holding a shell, with black linework and soft red and blue wash, on the front of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style monkey on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a monkey-like primate crouched with its arms wrapped around a curled shell-like object. Bold black outlines and loose sketched hatching define the fur and limbs, with soft salmon and pale blue washes behind the figure. The figure fills the frame diagonally across the upper thigh, with a faint blue circle behind the head.

Thigh Monkey Shell Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monkey came off the Mary Ellen Dunn in a crate of oranges, and by the time you had scrubbed the hold it had already stolen the cook's spoon and a widow's glove from the fish market. Nobody on Skerrow quay wanted it. Old Hesketh said it would bring bad weather, and his wife said it was the moon's own pet, because it sat on the harbour wall every night staring up at the white disc over the lighthouse as if the moon owed it money.

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You were the one who fed it. Scraps of mackerel, a heel of bread from your tea. It took them from your palm with fingers that seemed almost careful, then went back to its shell, a great pink whorl it had pulled from the net on the day the Dunn came in. It would not let anyone touch the shell. When the gale came up off the Minch that November, it wrapped its arms around the whorl and held on, and the men laughed that a beast would choose a bit of old lime over the warm hold below.

The Dunn did not come back on the Thursday. On the Friday morning you found the monkey on the harbour wall, dry and cold, the shell still clutched to its chest. Washed up on the slip beside it lay a brass lamp with the boat's name worn into the rim, and nothing else. You sat down on the wet stone beside it and waited for the tide to turn, the way it had waited every night for the moon.