Black fine line whale tattoo on a wrist, with small script above it and a woven bracelet beside it.

Whale tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black line drawing of a whale sits on the inner wrist and lower forearm, with its tail curving toward the top of the frame. A small line of script and a single small mark sit above it, close to a woven cord bracelet. The linework is thin and uniform, with no shading, and the paving stones and jeans in the background are out of focus.

Fine line Forearm Whale Script

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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

Nobody in Wrayford believed Tom Creasey when he said the whale had come up the estuary on the spring tide. He was the lock-keeper's boy, and he had a habit of counting things twice. So when he marked the fourth fathom on the quay wall with chalk and wrote the time beside it, the harbourmaster only sighed and asked him to fetch the ledger.

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The whale did not look like a wonder. It looked grey and tired and far too big for the channel, lying against the mud at the bend below the saltworks with its long tail lifted as if it were listening for something. Children came down to throw pebbles. A curate read a psalm over it that nobody had asked for. Tom sat on the wall and sketched it with a stub of carpenter's pencil, drawing the line of its back in one unbroken stroke, because his father had told him that a true thing could be drawn without lifting the pen.

On the third morning the wind backed round to the north and the water went out further than anyone had seen it. The whale was gone, though the mud still held the curve of its body. Tom found a single white tooth in the ooze, no longer than his thumb, and a scrap of paper pressed flat beneath it. The writing was faint and salt-smudged: Tell them I went out with the ebb. He threaded the tooth onto a length of cord and pressed the paper into the ledger, where it stayed for forty years.