Solid black tribal-style penguin tattoo with a spiral belly and a small red heart outline above it, on the inner ankle.

Penguin and red heart on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A solid black penguin silhouette with a white spiral cut into its body and a white eye and beak detail sits on the skin of the lower leg near the ankle. A thin red heart outline sits above and to the left of the penguin. The black ink is bold and filled, with the red line work giving the image its only colour against the pale skin.

Ankle Penguin Heart Spiral

Find an artist for this

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

You find the penguin in the lost property box behind the waltzer, wedged under a tangle of ticket rolls and a single left trainer. It is the size of a bin bag, black as wet slate, and someone has pushed a bent coat hanger through one flipper. Mrs Okonedo, who has run the coconut shy since before you were born, says it belonged to the Dodgem man who drove off to Skegness with the candyfloss van and never came back for it. "Nobody wants a penguin that won't waddle," she says, and she is right, because the thing has sat in that box since spring.

Keep reading

You carry it out to the grass beside the helter-skelter. The white spiral winds round its belly like a ribbon you could follow with a fingertip. You tell it you have a six o'clock shift and nobody to take it over. It does not argue. When the generator coughs and the bulbs flicker on, the penguin tilts its head the way a bird does at a sound it half remembers, and then it simply walks, slow and certain, up the wooden steps and down the twisting slide, round and round the spiral, until it reaches the bottom and stops at your feet with its beak pointing at the sky.

The lad from the rides laughs until he has to sit on a crate. Mrs Okonedo covers her mouth with her hand. By nine there is a queue for the slide that stretches past the hook-a-duck, and every child who reaches the bottom is handed a ticket with a red heart drawn on it in biro, because nobody has told you not to.

The Dodgem man never comes back. The penguin stays through the season, through the winter when the field goes to mud, and on the last night of the fair you find it at the top of the slide with its flippers folded, gazing down at the empty grass as though it had only ever been waiting for the lights to go out.