Black and grey dotwork whale shark tattoo with blackwork shading on the upper arm, swimming diagonally up the limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Whale shark on the upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A whale shark swims diagonally across the arm, shown from the side with its tail rising toward the top of the frame. The body is filled with small dots forming the spotted pattern, with denser black areas along the back and fins. Soft grey shading on the skin around the shark gives it depth against the plain, pale background.

Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Shark Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lantern, Pell, it's the only one we've got that doesn't smoke. Sit down before you fall in the harbour and frighten the crabs. Good. Now, you want the one about the king who tried to buy the sea.

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Far down the coast of Ammerith, where the kingdom ran out of maps and the old men simply pointed west, there was a bay called Quiet Teeth. Nobody fished it, for the water there held a creature the length of a longship, grey as slate and freckled all over like a thrush's egg. The fishermen called it the Patient One. It never bit. It only opened its great mouth and let the little silver fish drift in, and when the sun went down it rose to the surface and drank the sky.

King Oswen heard of it from a merchant with a lisp and sent for a net that could hold a mountain. Forty men hauled it onto the royal ships. At dawn they rowed out, and the smallest child in the harbour, Tamsin Reeve, who was nine and had no business being there, climbed onto the bow to count the spots. She reached eleven hundred before the net went over. Then she lost her place, because the creature turned its head and looked at her with an eye like a wet pebble.

What happened next the king never wrote down. The old women say the shark swam slowly under the boats, lifting them on its back until the net sagged, and then it went down into the deep, dragging nothing but the silence behind it. The net came up empty except for one small disc of sea-worn bone, which Tamsin kept in her pocket for the rest of her life.

Every evening afterwards she walked to the end of the jetty and counted the freckles on the dark water, the moon's reflection breaking into more pieces than any child could hold. She never once got past eleven hundred. Then she went home to bed, and the sea went on being the sea.