Black and grey realism tattoo of a humpback whale on the upper arm, with the arm raised and flexed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Whale on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black and grey tattoo of a whale, shown swimming diagonally across the upper arm. The body is rendered with fine stippled shading and darker mass along the back, giving it a textured, realistic look. The arm is held out horizontally against a plain light background, which keeps the focus on the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the lamp. I'll tell it the way my grandfather told it to me, with the sea still in his mouth. It was the spring the Dora Keel went north past the Faroes with eleven men aboard and a cook who could not boil an egg. Fourth day out the fog came off the water like wet wool, and there she was, the whale, lying alongside us so close you could have spat on her.

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She was a humpback, a cow, near as long as the Keel and grey as slate, and her back was speckled all over, as though fine rain had settled on her and never dried. Old Ned Pascoe swore she was counting us. The mate wanted the iron. Ned wanted to be left alone with his tea. The skipper, Amos Venn, stood at the rail with the harpoon gun between his boots and said nothing for the better part of an hour, which was how you knew he was thinking.

Then the whale rolled, slow, and her great fluke lifted clear of the fog with water running off it in strings. She passed under the hull, and we felt her go by like a train in a tunnel. When she surfaced again she was forty yards off, heading west into the open, and she never once looked back. Amos put the gun below deck that night and never took it up again. We came home with a hold of salt cod and not a drop of oil, and the owners wrote us all down as fools. My grandfather said the fools were the ones who had counted nothing but money.

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