Black fine line dolphin tattoo on the upper back near the shoulder blade, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dolphin on the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single dolphin drawn in a continuous, sketchy black outline, curving upwards with its tail flicked over the top and its eye marked by a small dot. The linework is thin and varies in weight, with no shading, and the design sits on a pale, softly lit area of upper back. The photograph is black and white, with a dark vignette around the edges that keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Back Dolphin Sea creature Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dolphin came in on the Tuesday tide, the same week Mrs Pardoe's boiler gave up for good, and Ma decided one bad thing had to be the cause of the other. I didn't argue. I was twenty-two and bored of the grey promenade, and when I saw a grey back rolling past the groyne at six in the morning I ran down the steps in my nightdress and forgot to be embarrassed.

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Mr Abernethy found me there, a lodger from the top front room who had drawn harbour charts for the Admiralty before his knees went. He didn't ask why I was barefoot on the shingle. He took the pencil stub from behind my ear and said the trick with a moving thing was to keep the line going and never lift it, because the moment you stopped to check, the creature was already somewhere else. He showed me on the back of a laundry docket: one long stroke that curled up, flicked over itself, dipped its nose and came round to where it began.

The dolphin kept coming back that summer, always in the early hours, always heading east along the bay. I tried a hundred times on the kitchen window with my finger, my breath fogging the glass, the line breaking every time I looked up to see if it was still there. Mr Abernethy died in September, quietly, in the top front room, and left me his pens and the docket folded inside a tin.

I still do it without thinking. Last week a woman at the bus stop asked where I'd had the dolphin done, and I told her it was the only thing I ever finished without lifting the pen.