Colour traditional-style tattoo of a grinning cartoon shark with a purple banner reading SHART, on a limb with a partly visible line-art tattoo at the lower left.

Cartoon shark with SHART banner

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A cartoon shark with a grey body, yellow-tinged underside and a black outline swims to the right, with a pale purple banner reading SHART across its middle. The shark's tail has a light blue outline and wavy motion lines behind it, and a second tattoo of thin black line-art foliage is partly visible at the lower left. The shading is flat with bold, even outlines, and the photo is taken close-up on a hairy limb.

Traditional Other Shark Banner Ribbon Text Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ivy Coad had three rules for Seaspray House: no dogs on the beds, no whistling after ten, and nobody touched the bathroom wall. The wall belonged to the shark. Dennis, the lodger in the back room, had painted it in August, the week the rain set in and her grandson Alfie stopped speaking to anyone who wasn't a seagull. It was a grey shark with a cheeky eye and a light blue tail, swimming straight at the window as if it meant to leave by it.

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Dennis had been a signwriter in Weymouth for forty years, and he did not make mistakes with letters. So when Alfie asked him to put a banner across the shark's middle, and Dennis painted the word in curly plum capitals, Ivy assumed the second T was a joke she was too old to get. Alfie laughed so hard he had to sit on the stairs. Dennis said it was Cornish, and that he would not be taking questions about it.

Guests asked. A honeymoon couple from Leeds asked, and a curate who had booked a week of quiet and got a week of Alfie reading the banner aloud at breakfast. The man from the council asked twice, once with a clipboard and once without. Ivy told them all the same thing, which was that the shark had been there before the damp and would be there after.

In October she finally climbed the step ladder with a pot of white emulsion, meaning to cover it. She stood there a long while with the brush dripping. The waves Dennis had painted behind the tail seemed to move in the lamplight, and the shark looked less like a joke than like something on its way somewhere better. She came down again, put the lid on the paint, and told Alfie the shark could stay, provided he never, ever tried to spell it himself.