Traditional colour tattoo of a dark shark wrapped around a ship's wheel with a pink rose and green leaves, on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shark and ship's wheel with rose

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A dark shark curls around a red and yellow ship's wheel, with a pink rose and green leaves rising behind it. The shark is outlined in bold black lines and shaded in dark grey and blue, while the rose and wheel carry the main colour. The design fills the centre of the frame against plain skin, with a patterned fabric edge and partial marks from other tattoos visible at the edges.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

Keep reading

The frost came in on Tuesday and hasn't gone. Dad has taken the wheel off the Mary Ellen and hung it on the barn door where the hay hooks used to be, because he said a thing that's come off the sea shouldn't be left to rot in the lean-to. Mum says it looks like a clock for someone who has given up on time.

Mr Pryor from the agricultural merchants came up in the Land Rover to collect the sheep dip and stopped dead in the yard. He asked what was wrong with the shark. Nothing's wrong with it, I said. It has been swimming round that wheel since the boat went down off Spurn, and he didn't say another word. He just counted the pallets twice and drove off without his receipt.

The rose is from the hedge by the gate, the one you cut for Mum the spring before you went. It has come back wild and bent over the wire, and I've left the thorns on. The frost on the petals this morning made them look sugared, and I thought you'd laugh at that, since you always said I had no eye for anything that wasn't a ewe.

Write when you're in port, even if it's only a postcard of a lighthouse. And if the shark turns up in your sleep, don't tell me. I've enough of them of my own.

Love, Ruth

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