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 diagonally across the inner forearm, drawn with a dark outline and filled with fine stippled dots that model the body, pectoral fin and tail. The shading is grey-toned and sits against the skin with no colour ink. The whale fills the length of the forearm, with the head at the upper left and the tail fluke at the lower right against a dark background.

Dotwork Forearm Whale

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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

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the rope, for the tent poles are older than your grandmothers and they do not forgive a careless foot. Ask Mr Tolley what he paid for the whale. Go on, ask him. He paid a bottle of gin and a ferryman's boots, and he has been sorry about the boots ever since. The whale was not his to sell. It came up the Humber one February, a grey back as wide as a barn door, and it swam in circles under the pier while the gulls went mad above it. Every child in Hull ran down to see it, and every child came home with the same wet dots of spray on their sleeves, as if the sea itself had tried to write them a letter.

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The old keeper of the pier said the whale wanted nothing but to be counted. So the fair people took up the count. They walked the shingle with tallies and pencils and a brass telescope that had belonged to a drowned captain, and every stippled spot they made on a sheet of paper was one breath the creature had taken that winter. It took them nine days. On the ninth, the tide turned slow and the whale turned with it, lifting one long pale fin like a hand raised in a crowded room, and then it was gone past the mouth of the estuary, its flukes flat and dark against the going light.

So here is the moral, if you want one: keep your breath, and mind the boots. Mr Tolley still keeps the telescope in his waistcoat, and some nights, when the generator coughs and the lamps dim, he takes it out and looks up at the canvas. You will see nothing there but the painted sky. But he swears the whale is out past the last tent, still counting, and that if you hold your own breath long enough you may hear it blow.