Colour neo-trad tattoo on an upper arm showing a woman in a blue dress holding a pink parasol on a tightrope above a green crocodile.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with parasol and crocodile on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman in a full blue dress with a pink parasol, balanced on a tightrope above a green crocodile with an open jaw and red mouth. The linework is bold and dark, with shaded skin tones on the face and smooth colour fills across the dress, parasol and crocodile. The collage has three views: a full view of the arm and two close crops of the crocodile and the woman's face and roses.

Neo-trad Upper arm Woman Dress Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look down, I told her, and of course she looked down, because Ada Penrose never did a thing a barker told her. Forty feet of wire ran between the two poles of the Lantern Fair, and under it, in a tank of brown water the colour of stewed tea, lay Old Gustav. Twelve foot of crocodile, bought off a sailor in Hull who swore he'd been caught on a cargo ship out of Rangoon and never once bitten a soul. Gustav had a jaw like a rusted gate and the patience of a deacon.

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She had her parasol, pink as a boiled sweet, and her blue skirts stiff with starch. Her mother had stitched forget-me-nots along the hem, and Ada always said those little flowers were the only thing keeping her upright. Halfway across, the wire began to sing. A boy at the front shouted that the crocodile had opened his mouth wider, which it had, because Gustav was always hungry at four o'clock. Ada laughed. She laughed loud enough for the whole tent to hear, the parasol tipped, and for one long breath the entire fair held its teeth together.

Here's the turn, friends, and I have told it true for thirty years. She did not fall. She stepped, one red slipper after another, to the far pole, and when she reached it she bowed to the crocodile. Gustav bowed back, or so the boy swears, and that boy has since become a banker, so weigh his word as you see fit.

Ada never walked the wire again. She kept the parasol, though, and hung it above her bed in Hull, where the pink still catches the morning light. Step up, step up, and mind the roses.