Two matching black and grey dotwork tattoos on a pair of forearms, each set in a solid black triangle showing a whale against a starry night sky with clouds and a crescent moon.

Whales and night sky in two triangles on forearms

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The left forearm shows an inverted triangle containing a whale tail rising from clouds beside a crescent moon, while the right forearm shows a triangle with a humpbacked whale's head and body above a cloud bank. The subjects are built from fine stippled dots and fine lines, with the sky filled with small scattered stars against a solid black background. The tattoos are rendered entirely in black and grey ink and are placed side by side with matching triangular compositions.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Whale Crescent moon Cloud Star Night sky Triangle

Find an artist for this

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

My grandmother kept the walled garden at Penhallow the way other people keep accounts, every bed measured and every frost written in the back of a seed catalogue. She would not let anything be planted along the north wall, where the shade sat longest. 'Nothing grows where the sky has to watch it,' she said, and I believed her until the summer I was nine and the moon rose over the cabbages like a paring of cheese.

Keep reading

That was the June the whales came inland. Nobody saw them arrive. In the morning there was a humpback's back lying across the cloud bank above the chapel, and by dusk a tail as wide as the potting shed was lifting out of the clouds beside the moon. Mrs Trevithick from the shop said they were lost, and the vicar said they were resting, and my grandmother said nothing at all. She only went out with a trowel and a paper bag of seed and dug a bed along the north wall where the shade was deepest.

I asked her what she was planting. 'Moonflowers,' she said. 'They open when nothing else is awake, and whatever is up there will want something to look at.' She pressed the seeds into the dark soil one at a time, counting under her breath, and when I asked how she knew the whales would look down, she only tapped the side of her nose and handed me the bag.

By August the stems had climbed the wall, and the white flowers opened every night, and the sky over the garden was full of tails and breath and small stars that I swear were moving. My grandmother sat on the bench with her hands in her lap and watched until the cloud thinned. The whales went back out to sea before the first frost. The moonflowers came back every year after, and she never once let me plant anything else on that wall.