Whale tail and face in the sea on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A whale tail rises across the top of the shoulder, above clouds and birds, and a sea horizon cuts across a man's face in profile wearing a collared suit. A second bearded face sits within the waves above the first. The work uses fine lines for the tail and water and stippled dotwork for the face, moustache and jacket, all in black ink and grey.

Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Shoulder Whale Sea Wave Cloud Bird Man Moustache Suit Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clerk at Porthgwidden had kept the harbour book for thirty-one years and had never once written down a whale. So when Ezra Penhale came up the slipway at first light with a fluke the width of a cart lashed across his shoulders, Mr Tregear put down his pen, took off his spectacles and asked him, very civilly, where the rest of it was.

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Penhale said the rest was in the bay, under the old bearded man who keeps the drowned in order. The whale had swallowed him off the Lizard in a squall, he said, and the old man had grown tired of him and spat him out on the ledge. Tregear asked for a witness. Penhale pointed at the fluke, its edges torn rather than cut and grey with salt that came from no sea Tregear knew. Tregear wrote: one fluke, one witness, weather fair, and underlined the last word twice.

That night Tregear walked out along the sea wall with his collar undone, because the wind had come round and the moon was high. The horizon sat exactly level with his eyes, the way it never did from the town, and the spray settled on his moustache like a second coat of salt. Below him, in the lift and fall of the swell, a face rose through the black water with weed in its beard and looked up at him with patient interest, as if it had been waiting for the clerk to notice the line of the sea running straight across his own face.

In the morning the book had a new entry in his own neat hand, dated the tide before, which he did not remember writing: one clerk, taken at the ledge, to be collected at spring tides. Penhale read it over his shoulder and laughed, and bought the drinks, and nobody in Porthgwidden has ever found the second line of that page, though the ink on it still smells of brine.