Black and grey iceberg tattoo with hatched shading on the outer thigh, sitting just above a wavy horizontal waterline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Iceberg on the thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A single iceberg is drawn in black linework with hatched and stippled shading that gives the rock a faceted, textured surface. The peak rises above a wavy line representing the water, and the submerged base is shaded with vertical strokes. The tattoo is centred on a greyscale photo of pale skin, with fabric visible at the edges of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The berg had turned over in the night, and by the time Edwin Vosper reached the rail the whole grey mass of it had swung its belly towards the sun. The mate wanted it logged as a peak, a fine white summit to be marked on the chart with a single stroke. Vosper said nothing. He had his pen out already, his board balanced on a coil of hawser, and he was counting the strokes it would take to show what the sea had been hiding.

Keep reading

He worked the shadow first, short vertical lines running down the submerged face like rain on a window. Where the ice broke into facets he stippled, dot after dot, until the rock looked older than the ship. The wavy line where water met sky he drew last, ruling it lightly with the edge of a brass square, because a waterline is the one thing a surveyor is trusted to get right. Behind him the second officer kept calling depths. Forty fathoms. No bottom. Vosper nodded without looking up.

By noon the sketch had a stain of salt along one edge and the mate had stopped mocking him. The berg had drifted a cable's length off, its peak still bright, its base still black and invisible to anyone who had not bothered to look under. Vosper blotted the corner, wrote the bearing in his neat hand, and filed the board in the chart case beneath the others.

That evening the ship's log recorded one iceberg, bearing north-east, of moderate size. Only the drawing showed what lay beneath it, and the drawing went ashore to the Admiralty, where nobody ever thought to ask the sea what it had meant.

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