Black and grey photograph of a small solid black whale tail tattoo on a finger, with a fine chain draped across the back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Whale tail on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small whale tail is tattooed on one finger of a hand photographed against a dark background. The tail has a solid black fluke with shaded edges and a thin stem resting on a short base line. The image is black and grey, with a fine chain across the back of the hand and dark painted nails.

Hand Whale Chain

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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

The logbook at Scarrow Head has a page for weather and a page for everything else, and your father never let you write on the second page until the sea had given you something worth it. So at half past six on a grey Tuesday in March you sit at the sill with the glass in your lap and wait, the way he taught you, for the water to break in the wrong place.

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It breaks two miles out. Not a wave. A fluke, lifted black against the white of the swell, held for a long breath and then gone, leaving only a stem of dark water and the gulls sorting themselves out above it. You know the shape before you have finished focusing. You carved it into the lintel above the stairs with a bradawl when you were nine, and your father pretended not to notice that it leaned.

You write the time, the bearing, the word whale, and then you stop with the pen above the page, because a second tail comes up beside the first, smaller, and the pair of them turn slowly south like two people leaving a room without saying goodbye. Your father would have written it down without hesitation. You underline it twice instead, then go down the spiral stairs to put the kettle on, because the light still has to be lit.

By the time you climb back up with two mugs, the sea is flat and empty and the lamp is turning, throwing its white bar across the water in a slow, patient sweep. You set the tea on the sill beside the open book. Tomorrow the ferry will bring the post and someone on the mainland who wants to hear about it. For now you leave the page open, the ink still wet, and let the beam go out over the place where they went under.