Colour tattoo of a leaping dolphin above a cluster of pink flowers and green leaves on the ankle, in a soft, realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaping dolphin and pink flowers on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A blue and grey dolphin arcs upwards, with small droplets beneath its tail, above a cluster of pink and coral flowers with green leaves. The dolphin is shaded smoothly with soft gradients, and the flowers use layered petals and fine green stems. The tattoo sits on a slim ankle against a patterned blanket, with the design centred on the lower leg.

Realism Botanical Ankle Dolphin Flower Leaves Water droplet

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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 nearer the fire, child, and mind the ember that has got loose on the hearthstone. Yes, this is the one about Pell, the dolphin of Saltmere Bay, who grew tired of the grey harbour and wanted something he could not have. Up on Harrow Point, where the wind comes straight off the Hollow Sea, there grew a clump of pink flowers that nobody had planted. They bloomed in the salt and nowhere else in the kingdom of Ardwen, and their scent came down the cliff every morning.

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Every morning Pell rose out of the water to smell them. He would arch his grey back over the breakers, throw his whole body into the air, and fall again with the spray running off his tail like beads from a broken necklace. The fishwives counted the drops as they fell. They said a dolphin that jumps for a thing it cannot keep is a dolphin still hoping, and hope was the only fish worth catching.

Then came Tobiah Crane, the queen's tithe-clerk, sent to the shore with a hemp net and a royal order to bring the creature in. He stood on the wet shingle with the net over his shoulder and watched Pell leap. The dolphin rose higher than anyone had seen, curved against the white cliff, and for one breath the flowers on the Point seemed to lean out to meet him. Tobiah's arms went slack. The net slid onto the stones.

He walked back up the road with dry hands and told the queen the sea was too rough. Pell still leaps at dawn, and the flowers on Harrow Point still bloom pink in the salt. Some mornings, when the sun is low, the drops from his tail drift back up the cliff on the wind, which is why the rain in Ardwen always smells faintly of flowers.