Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon shark standing with arms raised

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon shark stands upright with its arms raised, its body shaded in blue and grey to suggest a figure in a costume. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and a red splash sits behind the figure. The tattoo is shown in colour on a lower leg against a plain pale background.

Traditional Calf Shark Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the summer the regatta was called off for rain, Bert Lusk sat in the net loft at Porthavon with a roll of blue oilcloth and a head made from an old sea-chest lid. His wife told him he would never finish it by Saturday. He said a shark did not need to be finished, only frightening, and he meant to frighten the Mayor.

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The Mayor had voted against the Herring Jig on the slip. Every year the fishermen danced it with their arms raised to the sky, and every year the Mayor called it heathen. So on the Saturday Bert walked out in his costume, a shark standing on two legs in oilcloth trousers, its fins lifted like a man who has just hauled the biggest pollock in the bay. The crowd parted. Gulls rose off the harbour wall. Someone shouted that it was only Bert, and the children stopped shouting.

Mrs Pascoe, who kept the dye shop, was carrying a jar of cochineal up the hill for the church banners. It slipped from her basket and burst against the shark's back, a red splash the size of a dinner plate. Bert kept dancing. The Mayor, who had been ready to shout, laughed until he had to sit on a bollard, and by evening the stain was known in Porthavon as the Mayor's blessing.

Each summer after, the shark came back out on the first Saturday. The gulls kept their distance, and nobody in the town called the Herring Jig heathen in front of the lifeboat men again. Bert patched the oilcloth twice. The red never came out.