Close-up of a grey shark tattoo with a small floral detail on the inner forearm, beside a blue beaded bracelet, on a person in a white shirt, beige waistcoat and geometric bow tie.

Shark tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A grey shark is tattooed along the inner forearm, shown in a shaded, sketch-like outline with soft tonal areas. A small floral motif sits near the wrist, and the rest of the arm is cropped out of frame. The image is a soft-focus, wedding-style photo with a pale green background, and the ink appears to be almost entirely black and grey.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide table was the only paper aboard the Marjorie Ann that wasn't soaked through, so Nell Penhale drew on the back of it with a carpenter's pencil while the crew hauled the net. The mackerel line had snagged something heavier than fish. Her father swore it was a sunken pot buoy. It was a grey shark, nearly as long as the gunwale, caught by one fin in the mesh and thrashing until the whole boat shivered.

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The men reached for the knives. Nell asked them to wait while she looked. She sketched fast: the blunt snout, the dark eye, the gill slits no wider than pencil scratches. She shaded the belly with her thumb so the lead smudged to the grey of wet slate. Her father said a drawing never paid the fuel bill. She told him it might, the day the Harbour Board asked what they had been hauling.

They cut the mesh at last. The shark slid off the stern in a single grey rush and hung for a moment in the green water under the hull, turning its head as if it was counting them. Then it was gone towards the Wolf Rock, and the gulls went back to squabbling over the bait.

Nell folded the tide table into her oilskin pocket and never showed it to the Board. Thirty years on the paper is soft as cloth and the pencil has faded to the colour of the sea before rain. Every spring, when the first fin breaks the surface off the point, she takes it out and checks the date against her drawing. The fin has never once come back on the wrong day.

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