Black ink drawing of two whale tails rising from stylised waves on white paper, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two whale tails with waves

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two separate whale tail designs drawn in black ink on white paper. Each tail rises from a cluster of curling, stylised waves, with the left one breaking into angular wave crests and the right one wrapped in a rolling wave with spray lines. The tails are shaded with grey wash and white highlights, and the composition is spread loosely across the page with plenty of empty space.

Japanese Whale Wave Ocean Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Log of the Corinna Vale, third week out from Peterhead, wind backing south-west. We have had the tail of a whale off the starboard bow since the forenoon, rising and sinking the way a man might lift one foot to step out of a bath. Mr Tulloch swears it is the same beast that followed us past the Shetlands, and I did not argue, for I have stopped arguing with Tulloch about anything since the business with the lamp oil.

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The cook came up at noon with a ladle in his fist and asked whether we meant to hunt it. I told him the Vale carries salt cod and a crate of Bibles for a mission at Stromness, and that no whale has ever been improved by a harpoon in the company of Bibles. He went below grumbling. Later I saw him at the rail with his own sleeve pushed back, tracing the shape of the flukes against the sky with one finger, and I did not say a word about it.

At dusk the swell rose into long grey ridges and the tail came up again, close enough now that I could see the sea running off it in ropes. For a moment it hung there, black against the last of the light, and then it turned over and was gone, leaving only a ring of white water spreading slowly toward us. Tulloch said nothing. I wrote the bearing in the log and, under it, because no one reads this book but me, that the whale had waved.