Before and after photo of a shark tattoo on an upper arm, with a faded black outline on the left and a colour realism cover-up on a teal ocean background on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shark shoulder cover-up, before and after

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Left, a faded black and grey shark design with loose, sketchy linework sits across the upper arm and shoulder. Right, the same area is covered with a realistic great white shark in colour, swimming over coral with dark shading and a teal watercolour wash behind it.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Shark Coral Ocean Fish

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first shark was drawn in a hurry by Ned Coyle, who had never seen a great white and said so proudly. He sketched it in biro on the back of a fish-market receipt the night before the Marigold sailed out of Whitby, all loose strokes and scribbled fins, and he inked it onto my grandfather's shoulder in the back room of the Ship Inn with a sewing needle and a bottle of Indian ink. Nobody called it art. It was a promise that he would come back, and Ned never did, though the sea gave the Marigold back in pieces by spring.

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For thirty years Grandad kept the blurred shark under his shirt and told people it had been a good swim. When he died my cousin Bea, who dives off Dahab and has seen real sharks drift past her mask like grey weather, said the old picture looked like a shark that had been apologising. She found an artist in Hull who would work from her photographs of the reef and the shelf of coral off Fiji, and she wanted the new shark to swim straight over the old one, not hide it.

The session took most of a Saturday. The artist laid down a teal wash first, wet and bleeding into the skin like sea-light coming through a hull, then the great white came up out of it, grey-backed and grinning, with dark coral crusting the bottom edge. Bea stood at the sink with her arms folded and watched the last of the old linework vanish under the shading.

When the cling film went on, I could still see Ned's fins if the light came in low, faint grey ghosts beneath the new water, swimming the same way the living shark was swimming. Bea said that was the point. Grandad had always wanted to be the one in the water, not the one watching it come.