Black and grey engraved-style tattoo on the forearm showing a whale tail rising from the sea, with small figures falling beneath a large dark shape in the sky above.

Whale tail and falling figures on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a whale tail rising from rippling water in the lower half, with a rain-like pattern of droplets beside it. Above, a large elongated shape hangs in a hatched sky, with several small figures falling or tumbling beneath it. The design uses fine black hatching and cross-hatching with clean outlines, giving a woodcut or etched look, and the two scenes are stacked vertically on the arm.

Forearm Whale Sea Sky Wave Rain

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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

You are the one who keeps the back kitchen lit when the pass shuts, because the road has been closed since Martinmas and the only guests left are the ones who walked in before the snow. Tonight there are four of them by the fire, and a fifth upstairs with a cough, and the clock over the bar has stopped at a quarter to nine, which your mother would have called a bad sign.

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Just after the bells for the late hour, the sky above the ridge went the colour of pewter and something long and silver slid over the roofline, low enough to take the chimney pot. An airship, you think, though you have only seen drawings of them. Its gondola had split along the seam. Figures came loose from it like seeds from a dropped pod, turning over and over in the white air, and you ran into the yard with the lantern and the bread shovel, as if either would help.

The first one landed in the drift beside the water trough. The second caught in the old pine and hung there, swearing in a language you did not know. The third you never saw land at all, only heard the hush the snow made when it took him. Mr Abernethy, who has been drinking your father's gin since the spring, went out with a rope and came back with a sailor's cap and nothing else, and a look on his face you have not forgotten.

Before dawn the wind, which had no business blowing from the south, dragged the cloud off the valley and showed you a flat grey lake where no lake should be. A tail rose out of it, slow as a door swinging open, then sank without a ripple. You told nobody. You went back to the kitchen and put the kettle on, because the road would open eventually, and someone would have to explain the rope.