Black shark silhouettes and one fine line shark outline tattooed down the outer leg, from thigh to calf.

Shark silhouettes down a leg

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A leg is shown in profile with a column of shark tattoos running from the upper thigh towards the ankle. Four of the sharks are solid black silhouettes in varying poses, and one near the knee is a thin black outline with no fill. The ink is black on pale skin, set against a wooden floor and a plain wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the Marigold Rose keeps a tally of the sharks off the stern by scratching marks into the galley door with a bread knife. You have done it for nine days, one line for each grey fin that keeps pace with the hull. Pim the deckhand says it is bad luck to count what is following you. You tell him the sea does not care what you count, and that the knives, the tins of condensed milk stacked to the ceiling and the rota pinned by the kettle are the only things on this boat that answer to you.

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On the tenth morning the fins are gone. The water lies flat and green to the horizon, and you stand at the rail with a bucket of peelings and feel the emptiness like a missed step on a ladder. Captain Hollis comes up behind you smelling of pipe tobacco and says sharks follow a ship for her scraps and leave when the scraps stop. You ask him whether that means they were never really interested in the ship. He laughs, then does not laugh, and tells you to get the porridge on.

That afternoon a single pale shape rises under the bow, thin as a pencil line, and holds station beside the hull for a full minute before it slides away into the blue. You do not scratch a mark for it. Instead you take the bread knife and draw its outline on the galley door, the belly, the sickle of its tail, and you leave the middle empty. The kettle begins to sing on the hob, and you let it sing until Pim shouts that it is boiling over.

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