Illustrated flash design of a black and yellow orca with an orange tail, crossed by a beige banner reading IF YOU LOVE ME LET ME GO, on a cream damask background.

Orca with a banner reading If you love me let me go

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A stylised orca leaps upward with its black body, white-yellow patch and curling orange tail, with a grey shadow mark on its side. A beige scroll banner with dark lettering wraps across the whale, and the design sits on a cream patterned background. The bold dark outlines and flat fills are drawn as a tattoo design rather than a photograph of skin.

Neo-trad Banner Scroll Lettering Whale Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had left the young orca stranded in the shallows below Carrick Halt, and by seven the whole village was on the seawall pretending not to watch the last train. I was the only one on the platform with a key to the signal box, so the vet from Truro came down the line in the guard's van with a flask of tea and no ticket, and nobody asked for one.

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Its mother circled beyond the breakwater, her black fin cutting the grey water in a slow rhythm that made my hands ache. Mr Quick from the fish merchants wanted to bring the nets round. Dr Anand knelt on the wet sand with a bucket and talked to the calf the way my nan talked to the kettle, low and certain. I held the signal lamp up because somebody had to, and I watched the mother's passes shorten until she was close enough to lay her great head against the calf's flank.

When the water came back over the bar at half past eight, the calf shook once, flung spray across the vet's oilskin, and slid out past the breakwater in three neat strokes. The mother turned after it without a backward glance. Nobody on the seawall spoke. Then Mr Quick laughed, a short wet sound, and said the railway had never once managed a rescue on time.

I walked the last train back up the valley with the lamp unlit under my arm. At the viaduct I found my return ticket still punched in my coat pocket, its date long gone, and I left it there on the rail for the wind to take.