Colourful tattoo of a whale filled with constellations, clouds and orbs, with a blue paper boat below it, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Whale with constellations and paper boat on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a whale rising through a night sky, with its tail at the top and its open mouth near the lower forearm. Its body is filled with yellow constellation lines, and orange, teal and green orbs and pale cloud shapes surround it. A blue paper boat sits near the wrist, linked to the whale by a thin blue line. The shading is soft and painterly, moving from deep blue at the top to warm orange and yellow near the head, against a plain pale background.

Forearm Whale Constellation Star Cloud Planet Paper boat Sky Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the range, and don't touch that kettle till it's singing, because I'm not telling this twice. Nineteen fifty-three it was, the winter the herring stayed away from Porthgarrow. The nets came up light every morning, and Walter Pell's boy, Danny, who was nine and had more sense than his father, went down to the harbour wall with a sheet of his school jotter and folded it into a boat.

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He tied it to a length of blue thread off his mother's spool and said, loud enough for the gulls, 'You go and find our fish, then.' The boat wouldn't float on the tide. It lifted instead, the way a kite lifts, and the thread went taut and up, past the chapel roof and out over the water where the sky goes black before the stars come out.

And something came up to meet it. Big as the chapel, grey as slate, with a tail like a pair of scythes. The old people called her Mother Tallow, and she kept the stars in her belly, which is why the fishermen could always find their way home by her. She'd swallowed the whole sky that night, and the constellations glowed under her skin like lamps through a curtain. She saw the paper boat dangling from the thread, took the line gently in her teeth, and turned her great head towards the harbour to look at the boy.

Danny's mother came down the wall with a lamp and found him standing with the spool in his fist and the thread running out to nothing. The herring came back that week, every one of them, and the boat never came down. If you go to the harbour on a clear night you can still see it, a blue speck held on a string at the corner of the whale's jaw, and you'll see her wink at you, which is her way of saying the boy got the better of the bargain.