Colour tattoo of two penguins forming a heart shape, with an orange butterfly, a purple flower and blue daisies, in a neo-traditional style on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Penguins in a heart with flowers

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

Two king penguins face each other in a heart shape, with their orange and yellow heads, black backs and white bellies clearly outlined. Behind them sit a purple flower, blue daisies with yellow centres, green leaves, curling vines and a small orange butterfly. The bold outlines and smooth colour blending are set against a plain skin background with the design filling the frame.

Neo-trad Other Penguin Heart Butterfly Daisy Flower Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The penguins had come from a closing aquarium in Hull, bought for the price of a second-hand caravan, and by the last autumn of Pask's Travelling Circus nobody under sixty could say why a travelling show needed two king penguins at all. Dorothea Pask counted the week's takings on an upturned crate while the male, Caractacus, waddled across the sawdust to inspect her boots. His mate, Mabel, stayed by the ring gate with her head tipped towards him, as she had for eleven seasons.

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The man from the council arrived on the Tuesday with a clipboard and a cheque that would have paid the wages through the winter. He wanted Mabel for a seafront aquarium in Scarborough and Caractacus could go to the knacker's yard in Doncaster, or wherever penguins went when nobody wanted them. Dorothea said no before he had finished the sentence. Ada, the wire-walker's daughter who did the lights and the cooking and most of the rest, watched from the flap with her arms folded.

That evening a small orange butterfly came in under the canvas and fluttered up towards the painted backdrop her late husband had made, a meadow of blue daisies and a purple bloom above a pair of hearts. The penguins stopped their shuffle to watch it. For once neither of them made a sound. The butterfly circled twice, then drifted out through the gap in the flap into the dusk.

At first light Dorothea drove the lorry down to the empty pier at Withernsea with the two birds in the back on a bed of straw. She opened the ramp and they walked, slowly and without argument, down onto the shingle and into the grey shallows. The daisies in the cracks of the concrete were still open. Ada saw the butterfly lift off the nearest flower and go before the tide reached their feet, and nobody spoke until the two of them had turned and stood together, heads bent, as if the sea were only another audience.