Colour realism tattoo of a shark, jellyfish, sea turtle and coral on the side of the ribs, with a quote in lettering above.

Underwater scene with sea turtle and jellyfish on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo covers the side of the torso with an underwater scene. A grey shark swims near the top, with a pink and orange jellyfish, a green sea turtle, fish and orange and brown coral below. A quote in black lettering runs across the upper skin above the scene. The shading is smooth and the blue water fades into the skin tone at the edges.

Realism Ribs Shark Jellyfish Sea turtle Coral Fish Ocean Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Pavilion ballroom smelled of brine and sawdust, and when the band slowed down Eddie Marr kept his hand flat on my back and steered me past the bandstand without once looking at his feet. Above us the painted ceiling was a sea of its own, with sharks and jellyfish the owner had paid a travelling signwriter to paint the year the pier opened. Eddie said the shark looked like a bad-tempered bus.

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I laughed, and he went quiet, because he had something to tell me. His boat, the Marigold, was sailing for the Azores on Monday. Nothing bigger than a trawler, but he had signed on as deckhand and his mam had already cried into the sink. "Come with me," he said, which was a daft thing to say to a girl who had never been further than Scarborough. I told him the sea was for men with nothing to lose.

He stopped dancing then. He pulled a folded handbill from his jacket, the old advert for the Summer Ball, and on the back he had copied a line in pencil that his grandad used to say when the boats went out past the headland: to discover new ocean, I must have the courage to lose sight of the shore. "It's rubbish," he said. "I know it's rubbish. But it's what he said."

I folded the paper into my glove and we danced on until the band packed up. On Monday I watched the Marigold clear the harbour wall, a grey shape against the bright water, and I thought of the painted ceiling, the turtle turning slowly in its blue, the jellyfish trailing its pink lamps. I kept the handbill. Eddie kept the pencilled line. Neither of us, it turned out, had ever been brave enough to say which of us had let go first.