Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a cartoon whale in a sailor hat smoking a pipe, rising from a fishbowl, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon whale with pipe rising from a fishbowl

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon whale wearing a sailor hat and smoking a pipe bursts out of a fishbowl with splashing water, with an anchor marked on its side. The whale has bold dark outlines, soft blended shading in blue and grey, and bubbles drifting around its head. Bright blue, green, pink and yellow ink fill the fishbowl, fish and teeth, and the design wraps across the upper arm of a person in a white vest.

Neo-trad Upper arm Whale Pipe Anchor Bubble Water Fish Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Gullhythe kept a fishbowl on the ticket hatch for thirty years, and in all that time only one orange carp had lived in it, a fish called Mister Tully who never once looked up. So when the six-forty came in late that wet March and the bowl was found empty, with a sailor's cap floating on the water and a pipe smoking on the sill, Harriet Wren did not fetch the porter. She sat on the bench by the bookstall and waited to see what would come.

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What came was the whale. It had lived under the platform in the water tank where the engines drank, and it was as long as a carriage and had been folded into a bowl for reasons nobody now remembered. It climbed out with a noise like a kettle, shook itself over the timetable boards, and asked, very politely, whether the six-forty still went to the sea.

Harriet told it the train went to the sea on Thursdays only. The whale thought about this, puffed a ring of blue smoke at the clock, and said that was no trouble at all. It had waited in a bowl for a long time, it said, and a day or two on a platform was nothing by comparison. Then it lowered itself down the steps, and the rain ran off its back in a river, and the porters came out and stood in the drizzle with their mouths open.

By morning the tank was empty and Mister Tully had been given back his bowl, though he still did not look up. Nobody at Gullhythe ever saw the whale again, but on Thursdays a grey back rose and fell beyond the sea wall, and the six-forty ran with its windows steamed and a sailor's cap left forgotten on the rack.