Black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a shark with an anchor and rope amid curling waves, covering a person's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shark, anchor and waves on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large shark with open jaws and visible teeth rises above a rope-wrapped anchor, set within stylised curling waves. The work uses bold black outlines, smooth grey shading on the shark's body and dense dark wave forms. The design wraps across the upper arm and onto the shoulder, with the background showing a wall, chairs and small figurines.

Japanese Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Shark Anchor Rope Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shark had been repainted three times before Dad let me hold the brush, and by then nobody on the Hartley Brothers run could say what colour its eye had started out as. We hauled it every spring from Margate down to the marshes outside Lydd, bolted to the flatbed behind the dodgems, because the dunking tank was the only thing that paid for the diesel.

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Old Walt Hartley swore the anchor came off the Ramsgate lifeboat, cut loose in a gale the winter before the war, and that the rope was still knotted to its shank when the tide left it on the sand. I didn't believe him, but I believed the rope. Every night after the last queue had gone I coiled it again under the generator light, feeling for the place where the hemp had gone soft and grey, the way wet things do.

The turn came in a wet September at Hythe. The generator died mid-spin, the waltzer shuddered to a halt with forty kids screaming in the cars, and the board above the tank split down the middle, its painted waves sliding off like wet paper. Walt climbed the scaffold with a torch in his teeth. I held the rope, and when he came down he had the shark's open jaw in one hand, flaking at the edges, and he pressed it into my palm.

I still have it, in a Quality Street tin under my bed. Some nights I take it out and turn it over, and the teeth look exactly as sharp as they did the day we drove back up the coast with the lights off.