Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a whale decorated with sailboats, fish and an umbrella, with a bird on top, on the inner forearm.

Whale with sailboats on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A whale is shown in side profile, filled with teal, green, red and orange sections that contain small sailboats, wavy lines and tiny fish. A bird and an open umbrella sit on top of its head, and an orange and red fin-like shape extends from the side. Bold black outlines define the shapes against the pale skin of the forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that's the one the gulls keep stealing crisps from, and sit where I can see your faces. Now. The summer the Pelling girl won the regatta, the whale came up the estuary on the flood tide with its mouth open and one eye half shut, like a man who's had one pint too many. Nobody saw it coming, because the fog that year was thick enough to lean on.

Keep reading

It swallowed the boats one at a time. Seven of them, red sails and orange hulls, every one with a crew still shouting orders as the green dark closed over them. Inside, the water never stops rocking, so the sailors say they learned to sleep standing up. The little fish came to keep them company and swam in loops around the masts, and the sailors counted them every morning so they'd have something to do with their hands.

The whale had a passenger on its head too. Mrs Harrow had been walking the pier with her umbrella up against the drizzle, and when the great grey back rose out of the fog she didn't drop it. She just held it higher. A gull called Dessie landed beside her, decided she was dry enough to be worth sharing, and stayed. The whale didn't mind. A whale with an umbrella and a gull is a whale that expects weather.

They got out in the end because the harbourmaster sang the old regatta hymn off the end of the breakwater, badly, for three nights running. On the fourth night the whale spat the boats back onto the flat sand with their sails still full of its breath. The Pelling girl sailed home first, as she always does in the stories. And if you hear a hum under the pier on a still evening, that's the whale, still counting its sailors.

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