Watercolour-style orca head tattoo with red, teal and purple washes and dotwork speckles on the calf.

Orca head with galaxy splatter on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A killer whale head in profile sits at the centre of the image, with its black body, white patches and dark fin shaded in solid black. Fine dotwork speckles and star-like flecks spread outward and around the head, and the edges fade into soft red, teal and purple washes that suggest a galaxy. The tattoo is photographed close up on a lower leg against a blurred neutral background.

Dotwork Calf Whale Galaxy Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gather in, the lot of you, before the chip shop lights go off. I'll tell this once and you'll not thank me for it later. Down past Salter's Quay, where the gulls roost on the crane cabs, there lived a killer whale called Tallow, black as a wet coat and patched white at the throat as if someone had dropped flour on her. Every night she came up the estuary on the flood tide, close enough to the lamps that the dockers swore she was counting them.

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One night in February the streetlights failed along the whole of the river wall, and the town went so dark you could see the Plough through the smoke from the sugar works. Tallow came up on the tide anyway, and when she breached below the old customs house, she didn't fall back. She kept climbing. Water ran off her in sheets, and wherever it struck the cobbles it lit, blue and red, like something spilled from a jar of stars. Old Mrs Penrose from number nine swore the spray stung her face, and the spray tasted of pennies and rain.

Tallow rose past the chimney pots, past the gantry and the rooks, until the whole sky around her was specked with the same glittering dust. Then she turned her long head north, shook the sea off her flanks, and went out into the dark among the stars, leaving a smear of violet over the rooftops that stayed until morning. Some of the dockers say she is still out there, and that if you watch from the pier with your collar up, you can see her fin cut across the Milky Way like a blade through paper.

The lamps came back on at half past four. The gulls got back on their cranes. Mrs Penrose, who never once in her life told a lie, will still show you the blue dust she scraped from her windowsill, and she'll say, quite plainly, that the sea is bigger than we think.