Black outline tattoo of an animal-like shape across the top of a bare foot on sand, with the sea behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black outline tattoo on a foot at the beach

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on pale sand with a black outline tattoo across the top, showing a stylised animal-like shape with no visible shading. The linework is solid and even, and the ink is black only. A turquoise sea and blue sky fill the background, and the foot is in the lower centre of the frame.

Other Foot Outline Beach Sand Sea Ocean

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

The tide had taken the boats twice that winter, so when Nell Pascoe found the seal drawn in the sand below Gull Point, she did not call the others down to see it. She knelt instead and followed the line with two fingers. It was one unbroken stroke, dark where the wet sand had been pressed and pale where it had not, and it began at the flat rock and ended back where it began, as if the animal had turned round to look at its own tail.

Keep reading

Her grandmother had said the sea drew a creature for every house that had lost a man to it, and that the creature would stay until the house forgave the water. Nell had always taken this for a thing said to keep children out of the surf. But the outline had not been there at dusk, and at dawn it was clean and deep, the flipper curled and the whiskers lifted like a question.

She walked the length of it three times with the flood coming up the beach behind her. On the third pass she noticed the line had a gap at the throat, a place where the drawing had been started and never finished. Without thinking about it she took a stick from the wrack and laid it there, the way her grandmother had mended a torn net, pulling the stitch tight.

When the water reached the seal's tail it stopped, as if it had remembered something, and drew back down the sand. By noon the mark was gone. Nell went home with wet hems and said nothing about it, but that night she left the kitchen door open to the sound of the sea, and in the morning there was a small, neat seal pressed into the shingle beside the step, its head turned towards the house.