Traditional colour tattoo of a shark filled with mandala-style ornaments, shown on the side of the body beside a white line stencil of the same design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental shark on the side of the body

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A shark swims diagonally across the skin, with its open jaws and teeth at the top and its tail curving down the lower edge. The body and fins are filled with blue, red, yellow and orange ornamental patterns, outlined in bold black. A white line stencil of the same design appears on a black background on the right of the image.

Traditional Ribs Shark Mandala Ornament Fish Tail Teeth Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hetty Strang always said the shark came up the coast the winter the herring failed, and that it was not hunting anything, only looking for the boat that had stolen its sleep. We were tying off the nets at Cullen harbour when she told it, her hands black with tar and her pipe gone cold between her teeth. The men pretended not to listen, which is how you know they were.

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She said the shark wore its patterns the way a grandmother wears her good shawl, all rings and little suns stitched into the grey. Every scale had a face, she said, and every face had been a sailor's mother once, counting the boats back in. You could read the whole sea in that skin if you were patient enough, and nobody had been patient enough since 1870, which was the last time anybody saw the thing with its jaws open and laughing.

The boy who had signed on that spring, Davie Rennie, was fourteen and useless with a knot. He went over the side on the third night after mending the seine by lantern light. The next morning there was a tail the length of a man's arm lying on the planking, blue as slate, the fin edged with red thread. Nobody could say where it came from. Davie was found three days later, walking up the shore road with a shark's tooth on a string round his neck, asking for his mother.

Hetty tapped her pipe against the mast and grinned at us. Ask Davie, she said, if you can find him. He's the one with the nets on his shoulder and the sea still in his eyes, counting.