Black line drawing of a stylised animal with a flowing tail, standing in water beside a large swirling crescent, drawn as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling stylised animal standing in water

Black and grey · Flash

A single-weight black line drawing shows a stylised four-legged animal with its head lowered, standing in shallow water. Calligraphic swirls form a large crescent behind it and curl around its back and tail. The image is entirely black linework on a pale background, with no shading or colour.

Animal Swirl Crescent Water Line drawing

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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 last train left Hollin Bridge at twenty past eleven, and by midnight the flood had crept over the old goods line below the platform. You stand under the lamp with the ledger open on the ticket shelf, pencil in hand, because the stationmaster told you to log anything strange before you went off shift. Mist lifts off the black water in long curls, the way the signal wires used to sing before they were taken down. Through it you see a doe come down the cutting, slow and certain, and lower her head to drink from the reflection of the moon.

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You don't call out. You have seen foxes on the platform and once a badger asleep under the bench, but nothing has ever stood so still in water that seemed to hold it up. Her legs disappear and reappear as the ripples travel out. Her flank catches the lamplight and the tail sweeps round once, like a loop of brass ribbon on a shunter's lamp. You write the time in the ledger, then the word doe, then nothing else, because you have no idea what the entry is supposed to say.

At ten to one a lone engine comes through on the far line, empty stock, its headlamp swinging across the flood. The doe lifts her head. For a moment she looks straight at the platform, at you, and then she walks out of the water and up the bank without hurrying. The rings she has left keep spreading across the flood long after she has gone, out and out until they touch the bottom step, and you realise they have been spreading all night.