Minimal black ink brush drawing of a leaping dolphin on a white background, shown as a tattoo design without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaping dolphin line design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a leaping dolphin drawn with a small number of loose, tapering black brush strokes. The strokes vary in thickness and leave open gaps, so the outline of the body, fin and tail is suggested rather than fully enclosed. The drawing is in black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Dolphin Sea creature Minimal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mistress Orla, The third bell had rung before I understood that the dolphin would not come back through the breakwater gap. For nine summers it has leapt the harbour mouth at slack water, a dark arc going up and over the green swell, and the fishwives have counted its leaps the way they count the tides. This morning the water lay flat as pewter and there was nothing but gulls.

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I went down to the steps below the salt warehouse with the old tide-glass in my coat. Hal the net-mender was there, mending nothing, and he told me a man from Cardhollow had bought the creature from the fishermen for a crown, meaning to sell it on to the ships. I did not believe him until I saw the marks on the stone where its tail had struck, four short strokes like a child's drawing of a wave, and then nothing at all.

I have no proof of what the Cardhollow men did. What I have is this: the tide-glass ran out an hour early, and the water stood still in the gap for the space of a breath, as if something were deciding whether to go under. Then it lifted. It was not the dolphin. It was only the sea, rising to the sill.

Send no soldiers. Send the silver chain from the chapel instead, the one the dolphin always liked to nose through. I will hang it from the post at the next slack hour and we shall see what comes up to take it. Your loyal clerk, Edric Lowe, Keeper of the Saltmere Tides.