Watercolour tattoo design of an orca swimming among purple splashes, stars and soft pink clouds, shown on paper without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orca among purple watercolour clouds

Mixed · Flash

A black and grey orca swims diagonally across the centre of the design, with its white eye patch and belly markings left as bare paper. Loose watercolour washes in purple, pink and grey form cloud-like shapes behind and around the whale, with small four-point stars and dots of light scattered through them. The soft wet edges and blooms of the paint are clearly visible, and the design sits on a white sheet with a brush and paint tube at the top right.

Whale Star Watercolour splashes Cloud Galaxy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit still, the lot of you, and stop poking the fire, because this is the bit where the sea comes up under the pit heap and nobody believes me. It was the winter the Ellerby shaft flooded, and the water stood in the old drift like a black mirror. Your great-grandad Tom went down the ladder with his lamp to see the damage, and he came back up white as a sheet, swearing there was a whale in the water.

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A whale, in a pit. We laughed him out of the Crown that night. But the next evening the sky over the heap went smoky purple, the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and little four-pointed stars came out in it, the sort you only see from the top of the fell. Out of that cloud swam the whale, black as coal along its back and bare white at the eye and belly, cutting slow through the colours as if it was going home.

Tom said it wasn't swimming in the air. He said it was swimming through the water that had got up into the sky, which is what pit water does if you let it sit long enough. The men stood at the top of the heap and watched it go round three times, and nobody spoke, not even Hector Bell, who never shut up about the price of pigeons.

On the third turn it dipped its head towards the drift and let something fall, a spark of light that dropped down the shaft and never came back up. When they pumped the water out in spring there was no whale, only a seam of coal shining purple where the lamp had caught it. Tom cut a piece for every child in the row. Go on, hold yours to the light. See? Now bed.