Bold black horizontal bars tattooed across the ribs, with a great white shark photo shown above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black horizontal bars across the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The image is split into two parts. The top half shows a great white shark swimming in blue water, and the bottom half shows a person's side and back with a shirt lifted to expose the ribs. Five or six thick, solid black horizontal bars run across the ribs, with crisp edges and no shading. The background is a plain indoor wall with a red fire extinguisher, and the palette is limited to black, grey and skin tones.

Blackwork Ribs Bar Stripe Shark Line

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shark came in under the breakwater on the second Tuesday of August, 1956, and by dinner time the whole of Porthgwidden had decided it was your fault. You had the only boat with a working winch, so you were the one Dad sent out with a coil of rope and a bucket of pilchards, and you were the one who had to stand in the stern with your heart going like a pump while the great grey thing circled the harbour mouth.

Keep reading

It was longer than the Mary Ellen and far less polite. Its back was the colour of wet slate and its belly was white as a bleached sheet, and where the sun came slanting through the water it laid long dark bars across its flank, one after another, like the shutters of a shop being pulled down. Mrs Hocking was on the quay with her ledger, the vicar stood with his hat in his hands, and a boy you didn't know was shouting that he could see its teeth from the chapel wall.

Your father wanted the rope passed under the tail. You did it, and you did it badly, and for a long minute the shark turned its head and looked at you with one flat, unbothered eye. Then it simply leaned into the current and was gone past the wall, leaving a wake that rocked the moorings and a silence on the quay that lasted until somebody laughed.

That night you took a stick of chalk to the fish shed door and drew the bars as you remembered them, five dark stripes and a sixth you had to guess at. Your father found you there at midnight. He didn't say anything. He stood beside you and counted them with his finger, and when he reached the sixth he nodded, as though you had finally got something right.