Black and grey tattoo of two shaded dolphins curving around a yin yang circle on a area of skin, with the body part only partly visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two dolphins forming a yin yang

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two dolphins arranged in a circle so that their bodies follow the curves of a yin yang symbol, with one dark ink section and one light section. The dolphins are drawn with outlines and soft grey shading that gives their bodies volume. The ink is set against pale skin, and the close crop centres the design in the frame.

Other Dolphin Yin yang Circle

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 dolphins came into the bay at Hael the week the ferry stopped running, and my mother said that was no coincidence, because nothing on Hael ever was. I was nine, sitting on the slipway with my boots full of seawater, while Tam Gunn insisted from his boat that they were a pair of harbour porpoises. They were not porpoises. Anyone with eyes could see the beaks.

Keep reading

The trouble had started over a creel line. Tam said my uncle Eck had cut his buoys, and Eck said Tam couldn't tell a buoy from a gull, and for three months neither of them had spoken across the harbour wall. Then the dolphins began working the water between their two boats. They went round and round in a wide ring, one slate-dark and one pale as a gutted mackerel, and each time they came back to the mouth of the bay they passed so close to the hulls that neither man could reach the other without going through them.

My grandmother, who had buried a husband to the sea, sat me on her knee and told me the dolphins were only keeping the balance, and that if you looked at the pattern long enough you would see the two halves chasing their own tails. I did look. I saw the dolphins, and the circle, and the dark side swallowing the pale side and the pale side swallowing the dark.

The next morning Tam rowed over with a bottle of whisky he had fetched back from the mainland, and neither of them mentioned the buoys again. The dolphins were gone by noon. Only the ring they had left on the water stayed, flat and bright, for almost a minute before the tide folded it away.