Colour tattoo of a blue dolphin with teal water splash shading, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Blue dolphin with splash on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A dolphin leaps to the right, shaded in layered blues with white highlights along its head, back and fin. Soft teal and green wash-like edges fade out behind it, suggesting water or a splash. The tattoo sits on the upper back, and the photograph is taken close up with the body filling most of the frame.

Back Dolphin Water Splash Sea

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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 gate at the bottom of Penhallow field has frozen shut, so you climb it with the feed bucket hooked over one arm, the way your father did before his hip went. Frost lies white on the stubble, and the creek beyond the hedge is brim full from three days of rain. Something is thrashing in the shallows where the water spreads across the sheep field.

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It is a dolphin, or what the sea has left of one, grey-blue and streaked with light where the low sun catches its back. It should not be here, a good mile up the valley from the nearest tide. You kneel in the mud, your knees soaking through, and it turns its head toward you with an eye like wet slate. Its fin knocks against the ice. Each time it lifts its beak, the spray freezes on the reeds in small white crowns.

You ring Dilys at the pub, then the coastguard, then give up and fetch the tractor with two old horse blankets folded on the seat. The water is too shallow to keep it and too deep to leave it. By dusk you and Dilys have dragged it across the ice-skinned mud to the lip of the flood, and then the tide surges up the creek, lifting it clean off the stones like a hand under a child. It is gone before the torch finds the water.

In the morning the frost on the bank still holds the shape of a leap, the grass flattened in a long sweep and a fan of mud frozen mid-air. You still take the bucket the long way round, though the gate would open now.