Black line drawing of a humpback whale rising beside curled wave scrolls, shown as a standalone design with no body part visible.

Humpback whale with swirling waves

Black and grey · Flash

A humpback whale rises vertically with its tail fluke at the top and its pectoral fin extended to the right. Dense parallel hatching shades the whale's body, while stippled dots and fine contour lines describe its head and throat. Spiral wave curls sit on either side of the whale on a plain cream background.

Whale Wave Swirl Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea came up the stairwell of Gull Point Tower the night the lift gave out for good, and in the morning there was a whale in the car park, tail raised towards the ninth floor as if it wanted a look in at the windows.

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Nobody on the estate agreed what it was for. The council man came with a clipboard and a cone, Mr Okafor from the ground floor said it was a sign, and Mrs Pryce on the fourth said it was a bloody nuisance and the bins were full of it. The whale answered none of them. It only lifted its long white fin now and then, slowly, as if waving off the gulls.

Ada Moss on the fourteenth floor went down on the third day with a heel of bread and her late husband's pipe, which she had never once lit. She stood at the edge of the tarmac and told the whale about Tom, who had shipped out on a herring boat in 1961 and come back with only a tin of tobacco and a song nobody could finish. The whale's small eye watched her the way a dog watches a tin opener. When she ran out of things to say she set the bread on the kerb, and the whale took it with a sound like a wardrobe door closing.

After that the tide came in a little further each night, curling up the ramp in pale scrolls, until the car park was a shallow harbour and the whale floated in it with its tail up like a finger raised for silence. On the first warm morning it sank back under the grey water without a splash. The lift was mended a week later. Ada still goes down to the bottom step most evenings, and the stairs by the bins are wet to this day, though no one has ever found a leak.