Two legs raised against a pale wall, covered in traditional tattoos of daggers, a rose, an eye, a pocket watch and a whale, with a black and grey flower on one knee.

Full traditional leg sleeves with white high-tops

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

Two raised legs are covered from ankle to thigh in traditional tattoos, with a dagger, a rose, an eye, a pocket watch and a whale among the motifs. Bold black outlines and solid fills sit alongside a large black and grey flower on the left knee, while most of the work uses red, green, teal, yellow and pink ink. The legs fill the frame against a plain off-white wall, with white high-top trainers at the top of the image.

Traditional Ankle Calf Thigh Dagger Rose Eye Pocket watch Whale Flower Swallow Bird Lantern Sneaker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Mind the lantern, Tobias, it's the last oil we've got until Lerwick, and I'll not have you singeing the chart." Old Amos said it without looking up from the watch bill, the way he said everything, as if the sea had already told him the ending and he was only waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

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The whale came up off the starboard bow in the grey hour before dawn, a sperm whale the size of a chapel, and our second mate, young Pim Carrow, went over the rail with a harpoon line still wrapped round his wrist. Amos stopped his pocket watch at the moment that line went taut. He said the brass had to know the exact hour a thing was lost, or it would go on looking for it.

Years later I found that watch in a pawnshop in Hull, its glass cracked in a star, and a red and green swallow inked on the back of the case. Pim had wanted one swallow for every thousand miles so his mother could count his voyages. I paid four shillings for it and carried it home up the Humber inside my coat.

I took it to Amos's cottage at Easington, where he sat by the fire with his own lantern unlit beside him. He held the watch a long while, turned it over, then wound it and set it going. It ran a fraction slow, the way it always had, and he said that was the sea keeping its share. Nobody in that village has ever told me whether he forgave the whale or the boy.