Traditional style tattoo of a blue shark with bared teeth biting a diver's yellow flipper, with red blood splashes, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shark biting a diver's fin

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A blue shark with a bold black outline bites down on a diver's leg, which ends in a yellow flipper, with red blood splashes around the bite. The shading is flat with simple highlights, and the saturated blue, red and yellow sit against the light skin. The composition fills the frame with the shark angled diagonally across the piece.

Traditional Shark Flipper Blood Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are forty minutes into your last shift at Pellow's Travelling Fair when Marjorie, who runs the Aquarium Booth, tells you the new shark has learned to count. She means the old tank behind the candy floss van, where the diver in the rubber suit has done the Saturday show since 1962. You are the diver now. Your name is stitched on the chest of the suit in red thread, though nobody has ever once called you by it.

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The shark is called Brenda. She has a cracked dorsal fin and a temper like a wet Monday. Every show you swim the length of the tank with the yellow flipper on, wave at the crowd, and let Brenda take the fin in her teeth for a moment before you wriggle free to applause and a paper bag of chips. Nobody mentions that the flipper is a spare, or that the red on the glass is grenadine from the bar.

Tonight the generator coughs halfway through the act. The lights drop, the pump stops, and in the green dimness you feel the tug on your leg go on too long. Brenda does not let go. You kick, you shout into your regulator, and somewhere above the water Marjorie is hollering about insurance. You twist, the fin comes away in her jaws, and you float up through a silence so complete you can hear the fairground organ wheezing through the canvas.

They find you on the ramp with your mask pushed up and your foot bare, grinning like a fool. Brenda is still in the tank, chewing the yellow rubber with great satisfaction. Marjorie hands you a cup of tea and says you can keep the act if you like. You say you will think about it, and you do, all the way to the bus stop, with the sea still tasting of pennies on your tongue.