Black and grey traditional flash of a skull above a trident and anchor rope, framing a ship, a whale and a banner reading Sea Shepherd.

Skull, trident and whale in a rope frame

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A skull sits at the top of the design, with a trident crossing behind it and a rope looping around the edge of a central oval. Inside the oval, a ship with the letters SSCS on its hull sits above waves, a whale, and a small mountain. Shading uses smooth grey gradients and bold black outlines, with a white outline around the whole piece on a black background.

Traditional Skull Trident Rope Ship Whale Wave Banner Mountain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Haskard counted the blows from the crow's nest because nobody else aboard would climb that high in a northerly. Seven grey backs lifted and rolled in the swell, and beyond them a factory ship leaned into the wind with its smoke flattened like a grey flag. Captain Abel Tindall had the same flag painted on the Marigold Vane's mainsail, skull and trident and coiled rope, and he had painted most of it himself one cold week in Hull.

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Below, Tindall was feeding the wheel a point to port and muttering about insurance. He said the Marigold had no business chasing anything bigger than a trawler's net, but he kept the old harpoon line coiled where a man could reach it and never said why. Nell knew why. Her brother had sailed on the catchers and come home quiet, and the quiet had stayed with him until the winter he stopped talking altogether.

They got between the last whale and the catcher's bow by noon. Nobody shouted. Tindall cut the engine and let the Vane drift until her hull rocked in the wash, and the whale rose beside them, close enough that Nell could see a barnacled scar running down its flank like a stitched seam. It blew once, a plume that smelt of krill and cold iron, and turned south.

The catcher's gunner swore across the water and hauled his harpoon back in. Tindall looked at the empty sea for a long while, then coiled the rope back on its hook and tapped the skull on the flag twice. 'The sea has enough bones of its own,' he said, and turned the Vane for home.