Small geometric dolphin tattoo with a watercolour wash in pink, blue and purple, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric dolphin with watercolour wash on upper back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A small dolphin is drawn in thin black geometric linework, with its body divided into angular facets. The facets are filled with soft watercolour washes in pink, blue and purple, and a splash of purple and blue sits above its back. The tattoo is centred on bare skin of the upper back, with plain light background and a dark strap at the lower right edge.

Geometric Fine line Back Dolphin Splash Watercolour

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

Nobody in Porthkell could say why Tamsin Gale kept her knife in her apron when she mended nets, but everyone knew it was for the day the crab lines brought up something alive. It came on a grey morning in March, a dolphin tangled in the cord of a pot, thrashing so hard the whole quay heard it. Tamsin was the only one brave enough to wade in. She cut the last loop, and the animal lay in the shallows a moment, looking at her with one eye. Its body was edged in dark lines that cut its sides into angled panes, like a window seen through rain.

Keep reading

Where the water touched those panes, colour ran into them, pink and then a deep blue, as though the sea were painting it. The dolphin turned once, flung a spray of violet over the wet stones, and was gone beyond the breakwater. The fishermen laughed and said she had been mad to get in the water. But that autumn the Mary Ann went out in fog and did not come back. Tamsin stood on the wall all night with a lamp, and toward dawn she saw a shape moving in the murk, sharp-edged and shining wherever it caught the light.

The boat came home by following it. Nobody saw the dolphin after that, only the splash on the water and the glimmer of its sides running ahead of the bow. When the men climbed onto the quay they did not thank Tamsin. They stood beside her and watched the water settle.

The next spring the tide left a scatter of coloured glass along the slipway, pink and blue and purple, each piece with a straight edge. Tamsin gathered every one and set them in a jar on her sill. In the early light they throw small coloured shapes across the floor, and she says that is how she knows the sea remembers who pulled it out of the net.