Black and white photograph of a solid black shark silhouette tattoo on a forearm, with the hand resting on a bare shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shark tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black shark silhouette swims diagonally along the inside of a forearm, with its tail fin and dorsal fin clearly defined. The fill is flat black with no visible shading or fine linework, and the image is black and white. The arm reaches up from the lower frame, with the fingers resting on a bare shoulder against a plain pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hallett had taken the back room every August for eleven years, and every August he cut the same thing out of black card before he unpacked his shirts. He did it at the kitchen table with my mother's sewing scissors, never sketching first, the paper turning over his thumb as if it had already been told where to go.

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'Sharks swim with their mouths shut,' he told me the summer I was nine. 'Nobody believes it, but they do. A shark with its mouth open is only ever a picture of a shark.'

He sold them on the pier for a penny each, a black fish on a white square, and the boys from the fish market tucked them inside their caps. He never kept one for himself. The last one he made, the summer before he stopped coming, he gave to me. It was the length of my hand, tail flicked, fin up, pointing out toward the breakwater as though it had somewhere to be.

He did not come the next August. The letter from his sister in Padstow said his heart had given out on a Tuesday, near the bus shelter on Fore Street, with a parcel of kippers under his arm. I pinned the shark to the landing window that week and have left it there since, the glass gone faintly yellow around it. Each morning the sun comes round and throws its shadow across the sill, and the fish keeps swimming for the harbour, mouth shut, in no particular hurry.

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