Black ink flash design of a white silhouetted creature framed by swirling waves, scale patterns and fine dotwork.

Silhouette within swirling waves

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A white silhouette of a curved, sinuous creature sits at the centre of the composition, possibly a fox or bird, though its form is abstract. It is surrounded by dense black linework of swirls, curls, waves and scale-like fills, with scattered dots across the white background. The drawing is in black ink on white paper, with no shading beyond the patterned fills.

Blackwork Dotwork Silhouette Wave Swirl Scale Dot Creature

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

The pit at Carn Ddu had been dry for a generation when the water began to come back up through the floor, cold and black and full of small quick shapes. The men called it the Sea Fox because of the pale thing that rose with it, long in the neck, its tail curled like a wave about to break. Nobody had ever got close enough to say what it was.

Keep reading

Tomas Pell, who kept the pumps, decided it would not stop him. He went down the ladder each morning with a lamp and a tin of lard, and each morning the creature was waiting at the sump, turning slowly in the swirl of the water as if it were counting the bolts in the shaft wall. It never bit him. It only made the water curl round his boots in rings, and the rings grew into scales that lifted and fell like the pattern on a fish.

In the spring the water stopped rising. Pell said the fox had taken what it was owed, and the village argued about what that meant until the cage collapsed in July and two men were lost to the flood. After that the old women left a dish of milk on the pithead, and the water stayed down, though on still days fine spray still lifted from the shaft like rain that had forgotten where it was going.