Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a whale, paper boats and a moon inside a circle on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Whale and paper boats in a circle on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A whale swims beneath a band of waves, with two paper boats and a full moon above in a night sky inside a circular frame. The whale is drawn with a bold outline and parallel hatched lines, while the sky and stars are built from stippled dots. The black and grey ink sits on pale skin against a dark sleeve at the left and a plain light background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Whale Paper boat Moon Star Wave Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the coal scuttle. No, I'm not telling the one about the drowned bell. This one is about Ada Pringle and her father's whale, which was the only whale ever to come up the Lune on a spring tide and ask for the post.

Keep reading

Her father folded boats for her out of the Saturday racing pages, because paper was dear and a boat was a boat. She'd sail them off the harbour wall at Sunderlow, one after another, and every night the moon came up round as a saucer of milk and counted them. Nobody had told her that a paper boat is only a promise a whale can read. The big grey one came in on the night of the fog, lay down beside the breakwater like a tired cart horse, and blew out a cold plume that hung over the water like washing.

Ada didn't scream. She took the last boat from her pinafore pocket, folded it crooked, and set it on the swell. The whale looked at it a long while with one wet eye, then swam off with the boat balanced on its brow like a hat. Next morning there were eleven new boats tied to the herring nets, every one folded from a letter nobody had finished reading.

Her father never believed a word of it. But the sea has kept the peace at Sunderlow ever since, and if you go down at dusk you'll see the stars come out in dots, one at a time, the way she counted them.