Traditional style shark tattoo in orange, red and black ink on a calf, with a fishing bobber hanging from a line.

Traditional shark with fishing bobber on calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon shark with an open, zigzag-toothed mouth swims across the leg, with a bobber on a thin line above it and a partial swirl motif at the top. The bold black outlines are filled with flat orange, red and yellow, with some darker shading on the shark's fins and back. The shark fills the centre of the frame, with another tattoo partly visible at the right edge and skin texture visible around it.

Traditional Calf Shark Swirl Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bobber had been dipping since breakfast, and by eleven Ada Pryce had stopped pretending it was a perch. She stood on the back deck of the Mary Dunmow with a mug going cold in her fist and watched the red top bob, then sink, then bob again, the thin line running taut to the water below the lock gates. Her brother Teddy had rigged that line the summer he was nine, and it had never caught anything bigger than a bootlace.

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"Teddy," she called down the length of the cabin roof. "It's doing it again." He came up the steps wiping his hands on a chamois, squinting at the water as if it had insulted him. "Probably weed." "Weed doesn't go under like that." He took the rod and leaned back, and the line hummed, and something under the brown water turned slowly: a grey back, a fin like a folded letter. Then the mouth came up, all zigzag and red throat, and it did not look surprised to see them at all.

The shark that surfaced in the cut was, by any sensible measure, the wrong shape for a canal. It had the goggle-eyed sulk of a cartoon drawn in a hurry and never corrected. Teddy swore, then laughed, then swore again when it tugged the rod clean out of his hands and made for the bank. Ada followed it along the towpath with the mug still in her hand, past the lock keeper's cat, past the bench where the widow from number four fed ducks, shouting at it to mind the milk.

In the end it was the bobber that settled things. The shark, worn out by its own sulk, drifted up beside the gates with the thin line wrapped twice around one fin and the little red float bumping its nose like a bell. Ada knelt on the wet stone, unwound it with her cold fingers, and said, "Right. You're going back in." It went, without a bite, with the look of a creature that had always meant to.