Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a great white shark inside a dotted hexagon outline on the inner forearm.

Great white shark in a dotted hexagon on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A great white shark swims diagonally across the inner forearm, drawn with fine stippled dots and short hatched lines to build its body, fins and shadowed underside. A thin dotted hexagonal outline surrounds the shark, with small clusters of dots at the corners. The tattoo is entirely black ink in shades of grey on pale skin, photographed straight on against a plain light background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Shark Hexagon Dot Fish Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pins went into the seabed on the third day of the survey, six of them, set in a hexagon the way Tamsin had sketched it on the chart table. She had a steady hand and a worse temper. By noon the grid was dotted with pale nodes that the drones read as bearings, and I had stopped complaining that the coordinates were ugly.

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The shark came up under the rig on the fourth morning. Nobody had seen one that size since the reef died back past the old breakwater. It circled the hexagon once, slowly, the way a man walks round a table looking for a dropped coin, then stopped at the western corner where Tamsin had set the cluster of three nodes. Its fin cut the surface a metre from the hull. I counted the pale bands along its flank through the viewport until my eyes ached.

Tamsin wanted it logged as an obstruction. I wanted a witness. We argued over the wording until the battery warning blinked, and in the end she typed the species, the depth and the time, and the system returned a flag for a surveyor adding opinion to the record. She left the flag in place and sent it anyway.

When I climbed back to the surface the hexagon was already silting over. The shark had gone, but the dots were still there, faint as stipple on a chart, and I understood that the grid had never been for measuring the sea. It was for holding one animal inside a shape long enough for someone to count it.