Black and grey traditional style penguin tattoo with dotwork shading on a calf, with outlined stars partly visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Penguin tattoo on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A standing penguin facing right, with its head turned upward and its flippers held slightly out from its body. The bold outlines are filled with solid black on the head, back and belly edge, while the body and feet use stippled dotwork shading for form. The image is in black and grey on a lightly lit, slightly reddened patch of skin, with partial outlined stars and a radiator visible in the background.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Penguin Star Bird

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the coal bucket, because this is the tale of the penguin who walked up Cwm Ffynnon the winter the colliery stood silent. Nobody could say where it had come from. The carter swore it had ridden in the back of a lorry from Swansea docks, hidden among the sacks, and the chapel elders swore it was a sign, though they could not agree of what. What everyone agreed on was the way it walked, straight-backed and proud, flippers held a little out from its sides like a man about to be asked for his papers.

Keep reading

Old Emrys Pugh, who kept the lamp room and had no time for nonsense, went up the road to fetch it in. He found it outside the institute, staring at the star shapes frosted on the window glass, its head tipped back and its beak pointed clean at the sky. He stood beside it a long while. Then he said, in the voice he used for the men going down the shaft, "You're no more lost than I am, my love." The penguin looked at him and said nothing, which Emrys always maintained was the most sensible thing anybody had said that year.

When the strike ended in spring, the penguin was gone. Some said the sea had called it back. Emrys said it had simply got tired of waiting for a train and set off for the hills, feet slapping the wet stones as if it had somewhere to be. The lamp room door was left open that night, and in the morning there were three small prints in the coal dust, all pointing towards the mountains.