Pen and pencil drawing of two orcas swimming head to tail, with their backs and fins filled in swirling black linework.

Two orcas in swirling fine-line pattern

Black and grey · Flash

Two orcas are drawn in an upright, intertwined pose, with their heads meeting at the top and tail flukes at the bottom. Their backs, fins and patches of their bodies are filled with dense, swirling black pen linework, while their pale bellies are softly shaded in pencil. The drawing is in black and grey on a plain white background and centred on the page.

Whale Sea creature Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Morag had been told the two black-and-white bulls were trouble, which was why she went down to the slip every evening that July to watch them. The village of Skerrihoo sat on a crook of Shetland coast with eleven boats, one shop and a telephone box that worked when it liked. Her father mended nets on the stone wall outside the fish house and said nothing about the whales, only that they had taken a salmon net off the Gallans bank in June and would take another if left to their own devices.

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She watched them anyway. The larger one, with a notch cut out of its dorsal fin like a bite from a biscuit, came close inshore on the flood tide and turned on its side so its pale belly caught the light. The smaller one kept its head against his flank, rolling when he rolled. In the mornings the sea was glass and the ripples they made spread in rings that reached the rocks at the foot of the slip, and Morag thought they looked like someone had been writing on the water and thinking better of it.

On the last Thursday of the month the smaller one did not surface. Morag stood on the slip until the light went blue, then went home with wet boots and told her father. He did not call the whales trouble. He took his knife and his oilskin down to the water and came back at midnight with a bundle of netting and a face she had not seen before, and said that a thing that stays with another thing is not always a thing that can be left.

In the morning, two dark backs turned in the bay, one hard against the other, and they did not come in again that summer.