Small fine line outline of a leaping dolphin in black ink on the lower back, above the waistband of denim jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small dolphin tattoo on lower back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small outlined dolphin leaps upwards on the lower back, with its tail curving down and its head angled to the right. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is a single grey-black tone. The tattoo sits off centre against plain tanned skin, with blue sky and a jeans waistband filling the rest of the frame.

Fine line Back Dolphin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dolphin came up under the bow again, the way it had every evening since the tide turned, and Tom Riddell swore at it through the spray because he had no fuel left and the light was going out of the bay like someone pulling a blind.

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His nan had told him about dolphins when he was small, sitting on the harbour wall with a bag of chips gone cold. They herd lost boats home, she said, and you mustn't whistle at them, because they'll take it as a challenge. He had laughed at her then. He was not laughing now, with the engine coughing its last and the fog coming in grey and flat over the Mouse Rocks, where three boats had gone down before he was born.

The dolphin broke the surface ahead of him, arched clean against the dusk, tail curling down like a question mark, then dropped and surfaced again twenty yards on, always heading the same narrow way. Tom followed it because there was nothing else to follow. The fog thinned over the channel. Lights he knew, the chandlery, the chapel roof, swam up one after another out of the murk.

The oars were still in the bottom of the boat where he'd left them. He lashed them to the rowlocks and pulled for the slipway, and when he looked back the dolphin was gone, leaving only a ring of ripples and a smell of salt and diesel. In the morning Nan had a mug of tea waiting and said nothing at all, which was how he knew she'd been up all night.