Colour tattoo of three blue dolphins arranged in a circle on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three dolphins in a circle on a lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

Three dolphins curve around an open centre, each leaping in the same direction so they form a ring. The outlines are dark and the bodies are shaded in blue, teal and purple, with lighter highlights along the backs. The design sits alone on smooth skin against a dark background.

Calf Dolphin Circle Sea Ocean

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 rain has come in sideways off the harbour since before dawn, and by half seven the awning over Pascoe's fish stall sags under its own weight. You are kneeling at the back of the van, prising ice from a crate of pollack, when you hear the scrape of the gate and look up to see a boy with a bicycle and no coat.

Keep reading

He wants to know whether the dolphins came in again. Everyone on the quay knows about the three dolphins that have been working the bay for a week, circling the mooring buoys and leaping in the same direction, as if someone had drawn them with a compass. Your father says they are only feeding. The boy says they are saying something. You tell him to go and find his mother before he catches his death.

But when the drizzle thins at ten, you walk out past the lifeboat slip with a bucket of gutted offcuts, the way you always do, and there they are. Three grey backs break the surface in a ring just beyond the wall, each one arcing over the next, a loop of motion that never quite closes. You watch them go round until your toes are numb. The boy is at the end of the wall, soaked through, grinning at you as though he arranged it himself.

You tip the bucket. The dolphins come for it, and the ring breaks open, and for a moment the water looks like nothing at all. Then they swing back round, and you realise you have been counting them the way he did, one, two, three, and not once losing track.