Full arm sleeve tattoo of hammerhead shark silhouettes swimming over classical ruins in teal, with a torn orange section and a small red creature on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hammerhead sharks over ruins on an arm sleeve

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Hammerhead shark silhouettes swim across the upper arm above a teal sea, with faded columns or ruins sitting low in the scene. Shading is smooth and soft with some hard-edged dark shapes, and the lower forearm breaks into a torn orange section with a small red creature. The photograph is taken from the side against a black background, showing the sleeve wrapping the arm.

Upper arm Forearm Shark Column Sea Underwater Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat is already drifting by the time you tie the second knot, and Uncle Pell is shouting from the stern about the tide. You ignore him. The water off the north point has gone the colour of old bottle glass, and the columns of the drowned temple stand up through it like the ribs of something that swallowed a town and never finished the meal.

Keep reading

Everyone on Tessaly knows the hammerheads come to the ruins every spring. Your grandmother swore they could read the names cut into the stone, and that they carried the names out to sea on their wide, flat heads. You never believed her, but you never went past the third column either. Today the sharks turn in a loose wheel above the broken capital, their heads like shovels held sideways, and the light coming down through them is the same soft teal as the sky before a storm.

You go over the side with the rope in your teeth. Past the blue, where the light turns amber and then rust, you find the split in the seabed that the fishermen call the tear, where the old quarry gave way long before anyone on the island was born. A small red octopus is pressed into the broken stone, watching you with one gold eye. You open your palm slowly. It does not move, so you do not either, and you count your breaths until your chest aches.

When you surface, the sharks have drifted off toward the open water, and the columns look smaller in the grey afternoon. Pell asks what you found down there. You tell him only the stone and the sharks, because the thing under the rock is still watching, and you have decided it can keep its secret for now.