Teal humpback whale with black outlines and shaded fins, tattooed on the left side of a torso over the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Humpback whale on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A humpback whale swims upward with its head raised and its long tail fin curving to the right. The body is rendered with black outlines, layered teal and blue shading, and fine lines that suggest the whale's pleated throat and flippers. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso against plain skin, with a dark garment and a pale wall in the background.

Ribs Whale Flipper

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mules knew the Tallow Pass before I did. My grandfather walked them up it the autumn his boat was sold, a northern man with salt in his beard and no sea left to go back to, and he never once looked down into the valley. He looked up, always up, the way he used to stand at the bow of the Ardent Mary with his chin lifted to the masthead. When he died he left me his brass dividers, a whalebone tally stick notched in fives, and one rule. Never cross the snowline without a stone in your coat for the cairn.

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I have carried a stone every crossing for eleven years. This March the snow came early and thick, and the lead mule, Dunmore, stopped dead at Gallows Bend where the path folds over a crevasse no wider than a cart. The others bunched behind him. I pressed my palm to the rock and heard it: a low note, long and drawn, coming up through the stone. Not wind. He had told me once that the great whales sing across black water to find each other, and that their throats fold out like pleated sails when they lunge up through the swell. I sang the old northern hum he used on the mules, and Dunmore lifted his head and stepped across.

At the top, the wind turned and came up from the far side smelling of brine. That was impossible. Yet the meltwater was running the wrong way, down the back of the pass toward a coast I had never seen, flicking off the rocks in silver tails. I unbuttoned my coat, took out the stone I had carried since the first crossing, and set it on the cairn with my grandfather's dividers balanced on top. The mules shook their bells. Below us the snow went blue, then green, and rose out of the valley like something coming up for air.