Thin black linework ballet dancer tattoo with a soft purple and pink watercolour wash on pale skin, on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketch style ballet dancer tattoo

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A ballet dancer in an arched pose is drawn with loose, broken black linework that suggests the figure's arms, head, tutu and legs. Soft purple and pink watercolour-style shading sits around the tutu and upper body, fading out at the edges. The design is set against pale skin and fills a narrow vertical area of the frame.

Fine line Other Dancer Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas Ferrow cooked for a herring boat out of Peterhead, and the only thing aboard the captain would not let him burn was the porthole. Every night in bad weather he wiped the glass with vinegar, and every morning the steam from the coffee pot had written something on it. This winter it was a woman with one arm raised, bent back like a sail in a gust, her skirts flaring out in a ring of smoke.

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The deckhands said it was the ghost of a dancer drowned off the Tay. Ferrow said it was the kettle. He tried to rub her out with his sleeve and she came back thinner each time, as if the cold outside were drawing her in pencil strokes. Maggie, who ran the chip shop on the quay and had a daughter who walked the pier on her toes, told him to leave the glass alone.

On the ninth night the swell came up hard off Fraserburgh and the galley floor went wet with fish scales. Ferrow was bracing the pot against the stove when the porthole filled with light from a lantern on the far boat. The figure in the glass shifted, lifted her leg, and turned slowly to face him. He kept still. She held the pose the way a dancer does when the music has stopped and she is waiting for it to start again.

He began to hum the only tune he knew, a reel his mother sang over the sink. The figure's purple skirts caught the lantern and bloomed. When the boat rolled home at dawn he found the glass clear, bar a faint pink smudge at the hem. He never wiped it again. Maggie's girl now sits at the galley table to watch the sea through it, and says the dancer is still turning, only slower, the way you do when you have stopped expecting an audience.