Black and grey dotwork and engraved-style sleeve on the upper arm and shoulder, showing waves, a figure, a moon and a chain along the lower arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Engraved sea and figure upper arm sleeve

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, depicting a figure among crashing waves beneath a moon. The engraved-style linework is built up with fine hatching and stippled dots to create shading and texture across the sea, rocks and clouds. A chain runs along the lower edge of the piece, and the composition wraps around the arm.

Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Shoulder Wave Figure Moon Sea Cloud Rock Chain Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stools closer, the lot of you, because the wind coming off the Sallow Reach takes the words straight out of an old man's mouth, and I have no breath to spare repeating myself. You all know the chain at Harrowmouth, the iron one that hangs off the harbour wall like a sleeping eel. That chain is what keeps the sea in its place, and the sea has never forgiven the kingdom of Vennel for fastening it.

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Oswen Tarle kept the rope ferry across the Narrows in those days. On the night I mean, the moon hung low over the water, fat and pale as a cheese left out in the rain, and the waves rose taller than the chapel roof. Every sailor in Vennel had their back to the shore, bailing and cursing. Oswen did not curse. He took the ferry rope in both hands and hauled, hand over hand, while the rocks below grinned their black teeth and the foam reached for his ankles like a dog reaching for a dropped bone.

What the sea wanted was the key to the chain, the little iron link the council had buried under the quay. Oswen had no key. What he had was a ledger. He began reading it aloud, every fare he had ever taken, every name of every drowned man and woman the Narrows had swallowed in forty years. The waves stopped to listen the way a crowd stops when someone finally says their own name. By the time he reached the last entry the water had gone flat as slate.

At first light the boats came back to find him asleep on the ferry deck with the rope still coiled in his lap. The chain was rusted and quiet, and somebody had painted a new name across the stern, which was not his own. It read Honest Tally.