Colour Japanese style chest tattoo of a humpback whale surrounded by turquoise waves, with a small seated figure in a red and gold sunburst on the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Humpback whale and waves on a chest

Japanese · Chest · Colour · Photo

A large humpback whale with a speckled black and grey body and a striped white underside dominates the chest, with its pectoral fin and tail curving across the skin. Turquoise and blue waves with white highlights wrap around the whale and fill the sides of the composition, while a small seated figure sits within a red and gold radiating sunburst above the whale's head. The linework is bold and outlined, with smooth shading on the whale and vivid colour throughout, and the tattoo covers the upper chest and shoulders.

Japanese Neo-trad Chest Whale Wave Sea Seated figure Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come down on Saltmarsh market for nine days, and by the ninth the fishmongers had stopped calling their prices. Ada Greaves stood under her tarpaulin with a bucket of unsold herring and watched the gutters run brown. Then a man came up the slope from the quay with water pouring off his hat, and he did not look at the fish. He asked for the oldest bread on the stall and a dish of salt.

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Ada gave him the bread, which was stale, and the salt, which was grey. He broke the bread into the bucket, and the herring came up out of the water to eat it, one after another, silver and quick. 'Your sea is sulking,' he said. 'The whale wants to go home, but she will not go while the old woman sits on her back in the wrong place.' Ada asked him who he was. He pointed west, past the breakwater, to where a grey hump rolled in the swell like a sleeping hill.

Her grandmother had told her a tale about a woman who once sat on a whale's back to hold back a storm, a small figure folded inside a ring of sun, who had never been relieved of her post. Ada had thought it nonsense. Now she thought of the red and gold sunburst painted over the church door, and how nobody had ever scraped it off.

She went down to the harbour with the bread and her grandmother's shawl. The rain thinned as she reached the wall. The whale lifted its head, pale-striped, and the waves stood up in white curls around it, and on its back a small woman sat with her eyes closed, waiting. Ada climbed onto the stone, held out the last heel of bread, and said her own name aloud, which no one had ever asked her to give. The sky split like a yolk. The whale turned for open water, and the sun came down onto the market roofs.