Fine line outline of a leaping dolphin with swirling tail details in blue and teal ink, on the side of a ribcage.

Blue and teal dolphin on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A small outlined dolphin leaps upwards, with its body and tail drawn in a single thin line decorated with curling swirl details. The linework is smooth and even, and the ink shifts from deep blue to turquoise along the outline. The dolphin sits centrally on bare skin against a plain background, with fingers visible at the top right edge of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Dolphin Swirl Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The salt cart had lost a wheel on the Bwlch road, so my father sent me up the pass on foot with the mail and a tin of lard, and told me not to stop until I reached the cairn at the top. There was still snow in the gullies in May. I had my sister's letter in my coat, folded small, the paper gone soft from being read on the bridge.

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She wrote from Aberdaron that the sea had lain flat for a week and the boats were going out at four. In the margin she had drawn a dolphin leaping, with curls for spray, and under it she wrote that a dozen of them had come into the bay that morning, rolling past the rocks as if they had business somewhere. I had never seen one. I had only seen the sea twice in my life, both times from the back of a wagon.

At the cairn I stopped, as I'd been told, and something made me look down the far side. Below, where the path bent round a grey tarn, the water was flashing blue and then turquoise wherever the light struck it. A dolphin broke the surface, then another. It was impossible and I knew it was impossible, yet I stood with the wind pulling at my cap while they leapt and turned, a ring of them, shining in a lake that had never once touched salt.

I took out the letter and drew what I had seen on the back of it, the curve of the back, the swirl where the spray broke. When I came down that evening my father asked about the wheel and the mail, and I told him the mail was delivered. I did not tell him about the lake. Some things a person keeps for the road home, and that one I kept until I was old enough to be believed.