Two close-up photos of a traditional style shark tattoo with open jaws and a skull wearing a top hat, on a leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shark and top hat skull tattoo

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A shark's head with open jaws is shown in two close-up photographs, with red gums and inner mouth against bold black outlines and grey shading. A skull wearing a top hat sits below it, and dark foliage appears at the top left. The colour is mostly black, grey and red, with bold outlines and shaded tones across the shark's body.

Traditional Other Shark Skull Top hat Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Tolgarrow would say the sea got into Wheal Dora on purpose, but everybody knew the pumps had stopped the spring the captain died. The water came up the shafts like a slow tide, and by midsummer it lay two hundred fathoms under the chapel floor, black and still as slate.

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Old Mabyn Creber went down the ladderway anyway, with a candle in a jar and a heel of bread in her apron, because her son was still below with the last gang. She was seventy-one. She had buried two husbands and a daughter, and she did not expect to be frightened by water.

At the foot of the adit a grey shape turned under her light. It was longer than a cart, with a jaw like a split cellar door and gums as red as raw ore. Beside the drowned rails a skull sat on a ledge, wearing the captain's silk top hat, and it tipped the brim at her as courteously as a man at a funeral.

"Your boy is behind the third stope," the skull said. "Give the fish the bread and he may pass."

She broke the loaf and threw it. The shark took it in one bite, the water sank a hand's width, and a path of dry stone opened along the wall where none had been before. Her son came up it with his lamp still lit and his hands shaking. Behind them the top hat settled back onto the skull with a small, contented click, and the tide went on rising in the dark, patient as a debt nobody meant to pay.