Black tribal-style dolphin design on a white background, drawn with bold solid black shapes and white linework, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal dolphin design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised dolphin leaps upwards, with its head and body formed from solid black shapes separated by thin white lines. The tail curls into a tapering swirl at the top left and a long, flowing fin at the bottom. The design is entirely black and white on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Dolphin Tribal Swirl Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ysolde,

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The tide took the lower quay in the spring, so we have been rowing the drowned streets of Harrowgate Bay for three weeks now, cataloguing what the sea has kept. Yesterday Tomas found a dolphin cut into the wall of the old lifeboat house, just above the waterline. Nobody remembers who carved it. It leaps upward with its head thrown back, its body a column of solid black where the weather has polished the stone, and its tail curls off into a thin groove like a wave that stopped halfway to breaking.

We spent the afternoon taking rubbings with charcoal and damp paper. Tomas says the groove runs deeper on the left, which must mean whoever cut it wanted the tail read first, the way you read a letter from the top. I laughed at him. Then the light came low across the bay, and the long fin threw its shadow down the wall to the exact spot where the old bell buoy had rusted through, and I stopped laughing.

We have decided to leave it where it is. The sea will take the lifeboat house within a few years regardless, and one good rubbing is worth more to the archive than a stone we could never carry. Tomas traced the fin onto the back of my ledger, and I have pinned it above my bunk so it is the last thing I see before the lamp goes out. Come and look at it when the tide is right. Bring the good charcoal.

Your loving sister, Hetta