Pencil sketch of two dolphins curling around each other in a yin-yang arrangement, with swirling waves and bubbles, drawn as a tattoo design.

Two dolphins in a yin-yang pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch shows two dolphins arranged in a circular, yin-yang style, one with its head near the top left and the other with its head near the lower centre. Swirling wave lines and small bubbles fill the spaces around their bodies. The linework is light and loose, with soft shading and no colour, so the design reads as a preliminary drawing.

Dolphin Wave Swirl Bubble Yin yang

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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

Sit still and mind the pot, you. No, leave the ladle, I'll tell it while the barley catches. Off the Lizard it was, the winter the Margery Tew lost her foretop, and two dolphins came under the bow every morning for nine days. Nobody had named them. The bosun reckoned they were cousins, the mate swore they were lovers parted by a bad tide, and the boy Corrigan insisted they were the ship's luck come up for air.

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They never lay side by side. One would run down the starboard flank with its beak just clear of the foam, and the other would slip up under the larboard bow and cross beneath the keel, and round they went, each chasing the other's wake. Like a spoon stirring a stew, my mother used to say. The sea went grey and green and grey again, and still they turned, never once catching each other, never once giving up the circle.

On the ninth morning the wind came hard out of the west and a sea took the rail and swept my galley clean. I went down the ladder to find the stove drowned and the lantern rolling on the deck. When I climbed back up through the hatch, there they were, both of them, sat in the wash off the bow with their heads almost touching, as if the whole gale had been a joke and they had only been waiting for us to notice.

We made Falmouth on the evening tide. The boy still believes they went home together. I tell him the sea knows which of us it is keeping.