Pencil-shaded tattoo design of a pale dolphin and a dark shark curved together inside a circle, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dolphin and shark in a circle

Black and grey · Flash

A light-grey dolphin and a darker grey shark are drawn nose to tail, forming a circular, yin-yang style composition. The linework is loose pencil with soft shading that gives both animals rounded volume and highlights. The image is greyscale on a plain off-white background, with the figures filling the frame.

Dolphin Shark Circle Yin yang Sea creature

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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

Sit closer, the wind off the headland takes half of what I say, and you'll want every word of this one. Below the broken keep there was a cove the old men called Gannet's Mouth, and in the summers before the tin mines closed, a grey dolphin came into it every evening at the turn of the tide. She had a notch in her dorsal fin, the way a bell has a crack, and the children of the village would wade out to her and shout her name, which was Morwen, because that's what the Penhallows' girl had called her.

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Now the shark came in from the deep water only when the herring had gone thin. Nobody liked him. He was a dark, heavy thing with a belly like wet slate, and he came round the point on the ebb without a sound. Fishermen said he'd swallowed a lantern once. Morwen would not move off when he came. She turned on her side, slow as a bridge swinging, and the two of them went round and round one another in the shallows until the water went red with the last of the sun and the gulls gave up.

That went on for a whole season. Then one October a storm took the Penhallow boy off the rocks, and the village went down to the cove with lanterns, calling into the surf. The dolphin came in first, and the shark came after her, and between them they pushed the boy's sodden coat up onto the sand. Neither of them stayed to be thanked. Only the shark's wake, I'm told, lay in a perfect ring for the length of a pipe-smoke, and then the sea closed over it.