Black tribal-style manta ray tattoo with swirling patterns on the side of a person's waist.

Manta ray tribal tattoo on the side

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A manta ray outline filled with black tribal-style swirls and spirals, with a thin tail line curving down and to the left. The linework is bold and the swirls are shaded in solid black with grey tones, leaving lighter skin showing through the pattern. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso above the hip, shown against a plain black top and a pale wall.

Blackwork Other Tribal Swirl Spiral Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The manta came back on the spring tide, the way it had every summer since Tom Rowse started drawing on the net loft wall. Ada Penhallow watched it from the slip with her tea going cold, its grey wings lifting under the harbour lamps like a sheet shaken out to dry. She had told him to leave the soot pot alone, the tin of fish oil he mixed on her sill, but he had gone on regardless: spirals first, then the broad triangle of the wings, then the thin tail trailing away like a line dropped over a gunwale.

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"It's not a proper picture," she said when he showed her. "Nothing joins up." He said the swirls were his grandfather's, the whorls the old sailmaker used to stitch into storm canvas so the seams would hold when the wind got under them. Ada had known that man. He had never once finished a sentence without a pipe in his teeth, and he had never once drawn anything for pleasure.

That winter Tom went north for work and the loft stayed locked. In March a gale took the outer wall, and when Ada went down with a lantern she found the drawing still there, half-lost under the salt damp, the tail line running off past the edge of the plaster as if it had kept going into the dark.

She borrowed the sailmaker's needle from the drawer where it had lain since his funeral, and sat by the stove until the swirls on the old sail-bag came up under her thread. When Tom wrote from the north in May, she sent back a single stitched spiral folded in brown paper, with no note at all, only the tail running off the edge of the cloth.