Flash design of three blue dolphins arcing together in a tight group, shaded in blue with white highlights on a white background.

Three blue dolphins leaping

Colour · Flash

The design shows three dolphins, one large and two smaller, swimming in an overlapping arc with their tails and fins sweeping through the composition. The bodies are outlined in dark line and shaded with smooth gradients from deep blue to pale highlights, with darker blue detail on the fins and flukes. The dolphins sit centred on a plain white background with no other elements.

Dolphin Sea Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got under the awning by eleven, so Maud Pardoe stacked the tin trays against the tarpaulin pole and wiped a drip off the glass of the case where the brass compasses lay. Nobody came to a secondhand stall in weather like this, which suited her fine.

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The boy came at half past, hood up, dripping onto a box of brass hinges. He carried a Co-op bag and set it on the counter as if it might bite. Inside was a sheet of enamelled tin, blue and scratched, with three dolphins leaping through a curl of their own spray. "My nan said you'd know what it's worth," he said. "She's gone into the home. She wants it sold, not chucked."

Maud turned the tray under the lamp. The largest dolphin rose above the other two, beak lifted toward a sky the paint had worn away from, while the smaller pair chased under its belly, always just behind. She knew the maker's mark on the back, a crown over a fish, from a foundry in Hastings that had shut before she was born. Her mother had kept one hung in the scullery for twenty years and had never once let anyone wipe the sink around it.

"Three pound," she said, and then, because the boy's face fell, "and I'll write you a receipt so she knows where it went." She scribbled it on the back of a price card, pressed the tray flat for him, and watched him head out into the grey with the bag held over his head. Maud put the kettle on and, for once, didn't mind the rain drumming on the awning.