Close photograph of a realistic grey dolphin head tattoo with a detailed eye and fin on the upper chest, shaded with soft pinkish tones around the edges.

Realistic dolphin head on the upper chest

Realism · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A dolphin's head in profile, with its snout, eye and pectoral fin, is rendered in smooth grey shading that gives the skin a three-dimensional look. Soft highlights run along the forehead and jaw, and faint reddish and pink tones appear around the outline and beneath the fin. The subject fills most of the frame, with a dark, blurred background behind the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dolphin came up the estuary on the last of the ebb, the week the herring boats stopped going out. Nobody at Scarrow Quay agreed on why. Old Hettie Barr said it had lost its pod in the storm off the Head, and young Tom Pryce said it had followed the mackerel that the Dunn brothers had been hauling too close to the sandbar.

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What everyone agreed on was the eye. It watched the boats come in with a patience that made men take off their caps. Hettie's grandson Alf went out in the punt each morning with a bucket of pilchards and sat with his feet in the cold water, talking to it about nothing much: the price of coal, his mother's bad knee, the gull that had stolen his pasty.

In November the tide turned wrong and the sandbar shifted under the Dunns' lobster pots, and they went out in the dark to save their gear. The dolphin was there before them, lying in the channel, turning slow circles and keeping the men off the bar with its body until the water deepened under the keel. When Alf walked down to the quay in the morning, his punt was tied up tight and the channel was grey and empty.

Hettie still says the dolphin took a lobster from every pot as its fee. Alf says it took nothing and only looked at them the way it looked at everyone, then went home when it was done. Either way the pots came up full, and the Dunns still say a word to the water before they launch.

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