Black ink flash design of two manta rays in a Polynesian-style tribal pattern with spirals and dotted shading, drawn on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal manta ray design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a large manta ray swimming towards the lower right, with a smaller manta ray above and to its right. Both are filled with bold black tribal-style spirals, curves and scrolling motifs. The larger ray has stippled dotwork shading on its body and wing areas, and the design is shown on a plain white background.

Blackwork Dotwork Tribal Spiral Swirl Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour at Ardmor had one dance hall, and on the night the tide turned early the fiddler could not find his bow. Old Brannagh the net-mender said the sea had taken it as a toll, and the girls laughed, because the sea took nothing that wasn't offered. But the bow was gone, and the hall was full of wet boots and waiting.

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It was Nessa Dunmore who went down to the slip with a lantern and a tin of resin. She sat on the cold stone and hummed the reel her mother had hummed, and after a while the water grew dark and broad beneath her, and two great rays came up out of it, slow as bellows. The larger one carried a pattern on its back of spirals and hooked curls, black as tar, and where its wings folded there were speckles like spilt salt. The smaller one swam close at its shoulder, its markings echoing the bigger ones, as a child copies its mother's walk.

The larger ray lifted a wing and laid something on the stone. It was the bow, strung with weed and silver, and it sang when she touched it. She asked what was owed. The ray only turned in the lantern light, and the smaller one flicked its long tail and was gone under the swell.

Nessa played until the walls sweated and the dancers stamped the floor loose, and no one asked where the bow had been. In the morning the slip was wet with a single curl of black ink where the rays had rested, and it did not wash away with the tide.