Black fine line tattoo of a plump cartoon manatee with a single flipper and a small eye, on smooth skin at the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon manatee outline tattoo

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single black outline drawing of a rounded, cartoon manatee facing left, with a small dot eye, a short flipper and a tail curving out to the right. The linework is one even, thin weight with no shading or fill, leaving the skin visible inside the shape. The image is a close, straight-on crop of the skin in neutral light, with a small mole visible above the tattoo.

Fine line Ribs Sea creature Cartoon

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 manatee came ashore on the third day of the gale, rolling over the bottom step of the slipway like a dropped loaf. Agnes Pell, who had kept the light on Gannet Holm for twenty-six years, found it at first light, looking up at her with one small, unbothered eye and a flipper held out as if it expected a handshake.

Keep reading

She rang the mainland to report it. The coastguard asked whether it might be a seal, and then whether she had been sleeping properly. Agnes put the phone down and wrote in the logbook instead: Wind south-west, force seven. Visitor, grey, round, no opinions. The visitor took up residence in the boathouse, where it ate the kelp she dragged up from the rocks and slept with its tail curled out behind it like a sleeping cat's.

Every evening she wound the clockwork and climbed the stairs to light the lamp, and every evening the manatee drifted to the foot of the tower and watched the beam sweep over the water. Agnes began to talk to it while she polished the brass. She told it about the ferry timetable, about her sister in Penzance, about the new automatic system the Trinity House men had promised to install by spring.

The relief boat came on the first calm Friday. By then the sea had gone glassy and blue, and Agnes rowed the manatee out past the reef on the ebb tide, one hand steadying the dinghy and the other resting on its back. At the edge of the deep water it turned once, flapped its flipper, and slid under without a splash. She rowed home, climbed the tower and lit the lamp for the last time. In the logbook she wrote: Visitor departed, tail first. Light still burning.