Traditional colour tattoo of a shark's open mouth framing a palm tree, red sunset and sea, on a calf.

Shark mouth with beach sunset on a calf

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A shark's open jaws with rows of pointed teeth frame a beach scene. Inside the mouth, a green palm tree stands on sand beside a pale sun setting over wavy blue-grey sea, with a red sky behind. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills give it a traditional look, and the image is shown straight-on, filling the frame.

Traditional Other Shark Teeth Palm tree Sunset Sun Sea Wave Beach Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mrs Pelham at the harbour wall used to say the shark had swallowed the sun, and that was why the sea went red at teatime. Nobody in Scarrow Bay believed her, but nobody argued either, because she had the only dry pier and the only tin of barley sugar that lasted through the winter.

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The summer Tom Ashby's boat came home with its nets empty, the men rowed out in the evening to see for themselves. They found the shark lying off the point with its jaws propped open on the swell, and inside, held up like a lantern, was the sun, pale and wobbling, with a single palm tree growing on a spit of sand that had no business being there.

They argued until the tide turned. Some wanted the gaff hooks and the harpoon. Ruth Calder, who had mended more nets than any of them, said the sun would drown in the dark if they cut it free, and that the little beach inside was the only warm place the shark had ever known. So they left the jaws open and rowed home, and every evening after that the sea went red and the herring came in thick as wet cloth.

Ruth still walks the harbour at dusk. When the sun slips down behind the teeth, she counts them the way her grandmother taught her, and she says that is the bargain kept.