Black and grey fine line tattoo of three hammerhead sharks swimming in a row across the side of the ribs.

Hammerhead sharks swimming along the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the side of a torso showing a row of hammerhead sharks drawn in thin black outline. The sharks swim in a loose wave across the ribs, with the smallest shapes fading toward the edges. The linework is light and uneven, with no shading and no added colour, and the soft grey background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Ribs Shark Sea creature Ocean

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruett has put you in the back room again, the one with the window that looks over the harbour wall instead of the promenade, and she says it is a kindness. The sea comes in grey at six. By eight the gulls have divided the bins between them and the shingle smells of diesel and chips. You take your tea to the sill and count what the tide has left behind: a bottle, a boot, a child's spade with the handle snapped.

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On the third morning the fishermen are hauling something long and pale onto the slipway, and the boy who works the ice machine says it is a hammerhead, wide as a door, and they have cut its head off to sell the fins to a man from Ramsgate. You don't go down. Instead you think about the fins as they were, seven or eight of them moving in a loose line past the pier, the smallest ones dropping out of sight beyond the groyne as if the water had simply taken them back.

Mrs Pruett finds you at the window with the cup gone cold. She does not ask what you are looking at. She pulls up a chair, rests her hands on the sill, and says her husband used to swear the sharks came in every August to follow the herring, and he would wave at the fin on the horizon as though it were a neighbour. Then she takes the cup from your hand and goes to put the kettle on, and you find you are waving too, at nothing, at the flat blue water going out and out.