Realistic fine line humpback whale tattoo in grey ink on the side of a torso, with the words Pro memoria written above it.

Humpback whale with script on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A humpback whale swims left to right across the skin, drawn with fine outline and soft grey shading that shows the ridged throat pleats, pectoral fin and tail edge. Thin cursive script reading Pro memoria sits above the whale's back. The tattoo is in black and grey ink, with a white lace bra edge and a sliver of hair at the top of the frame.

Realism Fine line Ribs Whale Script Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been ruling lines in the psalter since matins when the whale broke the surface beyond the skerry, and he let the quill dry with a black bead hanging from its nib. Abbot Columba wanted the margins clean. "Nothing in the Office says a whale is worth a page," he said, and Anselm agreed, then went on looking out of the scriptorium window.

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She came back every spring, a grey hump first and then the pale fin lifting like a hand. Anselm began a second book, hidden behind the Rule, in which he drew her: the ridged pleats under her throat, the flipper bent like an old man's knuckle, the tail edge frayed where the Atlantic had worn it. Above each drawing he wrote the same two words, pro memoria, because the abbot had once told the novices that remembering was the whole purpose of the walls.

That winter the post boat stopped running for six weeks. When the tide finally let them walk the causeway to the mainland, Brother Edmund, who had carried the low notes in the choir, did not come back with them. He had gone out on the flats after a stranded calf of a seal and the sea had kept him. Nobody mentioned that the whale had been singing all that week, low enough to feel through the flagstones.

In April Anselm carried the book to the window and found the tail lifting at the skerry. He sharpened his pen and drew the curve of it, then wrote Edmund's name beneath the words, in a smaller hand, so that it would not crowd the page. When Columba came in to ask why the morning's copying was late, Anselm showed him the drawing and said nothing, and the whale went down into the grey water without a sound.