Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a humpback whale swimming along the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Humpback whale on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A humpback whale swims horizontally across the inner forearm, with its tail flukes on the left and its head and pectoral fin on the right. The whale is built from fine outlines and stippled dots that shade the body from light to dark, with heavier density along the underside and head. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin against a dark, out-of-focus background.

Dotwork Forearm Whale Ocean

Find an artist for this

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

Marit had been told the manifest was in order twice already, once by the captain and once by the boy who ran the chandlery on Skerra. She stood on the wet quay with the clipboard pressed to her chest and watched the crate swing off the tender. It was longer than a door and it hummed faintly, the way old refrigeration units did when they were failing.

Keep reading

"Open it," she said. Anselm Roe, the captain, did not move. Beyond him the sea lay flat and grey, and far out a spout rose white and sudden, then folded back into the water. Marit had counted eleven since dawn, each one at the same distance from the harbour wall, as if the animal were keeping to a border of its own.

Inside the crate was no contraband but a canvas, rolled tight. When the straps came loose and she held the edge flat against the wind, a humpback turned out from the paint under a pale sky. Its belly was dense with tiny dots, shadowed almost to black, and they thinned as they climbed toward the tail until the fluke seemed to lift out of the white. Someone had signed the corner with a pinprick of ink. The label read Reykholt, a village the new reservoir had drowned before Marit was born.

"It isn't for sale," Roe said. "It's going home."

She signed the form and let it through. Later she stood at the wall and watched the tender pull away, the canvas unrolled across its deck, the whale's fluke rising once as if in thanks. On the manifest she wrote a single line, nothing to declare but the sea, and then, because the rules said nothing about it, she counted the spouts again.