Solid black silhouette design of a dolphin leaping beside curling wave splashes, shown as a stencil-style tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Dolphin and wave design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a dolphin leaps to the left, with its tail fin rising at the top right. Curling wave and spray shapes in black sweep up from the lower right and frame the dolphin's tail area. The image is a flat black on white design with no shading, grey tones or colour, and the elements are arranged in a loose diagonal across the frame.

Dolphin Wave Splash Silhouette Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fuel light had been on since Alder Junction, and the road ahead had gone the colour of pewter, shining as if rain had fallen only on it. You eased off the accelerator and told yourself it was the heat doing its tricks. Ninety miles of straight tarmac will do that to a person.

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Then the shine broke open and a dolphin came up out of it, black and sleek as a wet tyre, arcing over the bonnet with its tail flung high. Spray curled off its back in hooked, lazy shapes that hung in the air longer than water should. You braked hard. The van slewed and stopped, and the road was only road again, cracked and dry, with a fine bloom of salt-white dust settling on the windscreen.

You got out anyway. The air smelled of brine and sun-warmed kelp, which made no sense in a place where the nearest sea was a dried-up lakebed two hundred miles back. Along the verge the sand had been combed into long, smooth ridges, the way a tide leaves them, and they ran off towards the mountains in a curving line, as if something heavy had swum through it and changed its mind about staying.

You stood there until the sheen on the tarmac faded to nothing and the wind pushed the dust back into place. Then you climbed in, wound the window down, and drove on with one eye on the rearview mirror, half expecting to see a grey fin keeping pace beside the dunes.