A visitor to the Vancouver Maritime Museum (VMM) was taken aback by the institution’s new exhibition “Tattoos and Scrimshaw: The Art of the Sailor,” which opened earlier this month and includes tattoo art and bone carvings by sailors including, according to Ann Pimentel, scrimshaw so graphic it qualifies as “whale bone porn.” “The Museum have [sic] a new exhibit called Scrimshaw which features numerous images of inappropriate nature (oral sex, sex, nudity, male anatomy etc.) on tusks,” Pimentel wrote in a TripAdvisor.com post quoted by the National Post. “As a mother and a teacher I was extremely disturbed and believe these pieces of ‘art’ should be removed.”

However, signage accompanying the series of whale bones carved with erotic imagery — which are installed in a high display case that puts them beyond the view of young children — warns kids and parents: “Hide Your Eyes! These pieces of scrimshaw are not intended for children.” The exhibition’s curator Patricia Owen told the Post that the museum has “more graphic” examples of erotic bone art carved by whalers during long outings at sea, but opted to show the comparatively tame pieces that scandalized Pimentel.

“Scrimshaw was definitely an art form that came out of idle hands,” Owen told the Tyee. “You had nothing to do, so let’s carve on this material that we have a whole bunch of. But it was just as much about group identity. Only sailors would tattoo, and only the whalers would do scrimshaw.”

Pimentel maintains, however, that this art form of idle hands is not for young minds. The display of scrimshaw “needs to be in an isolated room,” she told the Vancouver Sun, “it needs to be clearly marked, where a child or anyone under 18 can’t see them.”