Pencil sketch of a great white shark with its jaws wide open, its body wrapped around a ship's steering wheel, shown without placement on skin.

Shark with open jaws and ship's wheel

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a shark with its mouth wide open, rows of teeth visible, and its body curving through a ship's steering wheel with spokes and rivets. The linework is detailed, with cross-hatched shading on the shark's underside and inside the mouth. The drawing is in graphite only, with no colour, and fills most of the square frame.

Shark Teeth Ship's wheel Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wheel came up out of the Skerry Gut in the spring of the bad herring, lashed to a hatch cover with three fathoms of rope still trailing from its spokes. Old Tam Ferrie said it had belonged to the Margaret Lowe, and that nobody had steered her since the Michaelmas gale. The men carried it up the slip to the net store, and nobody would hang it on a wall.

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The shark came the week after. It was a grey brute, longer than the boat that tried to chase it, and it swam the harbour mouth as though it owned the tide. Every night it circled the moorings with its jaws wide, as if it were reading the names painted on the hulls. Ferrie's grandson, who was twelve and not to be trusted with a knife, swore the creature had the wheel in its eye and was steering itself home.

On the last night of the herring the shark came to the slip. Ferrie went down with a lantern and the old wheel, and he stood at the water's edge turning the spokes one way, then the other. The beast rose slowly and passed through the iron ring as neatly as thread through cloth, then sank without a splash. The rivets rang like a bell for a long while after.

Next morning the wheel was gone from the store, and the boats went out on the first fair wind. Ferrie never said where he had sent it. He only said the sea had been fed the thing it wanted, and it had given the harbour back its nights.