Realism style colour tattoo of two grey dolphins leaping through a blue swirl with white stars, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two dolphins with stars on a leg

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two grey dolphins leaping, one above the other, with a second dolphin's head rising near the top right. Their bodies are shaded with smooth grey tones and light highlights. Behind them, bright blue swirling bands suggest a trail or wave, with white four-pointed stars and a pale streak scattered across the design. The skin tone is visible around the blue and grey ink, and the background is a plain carpet.

Realism Calf Dolphin Star Swirl Wave

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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

Hush now, the lot of you, the chairs will outlast the sherry if you keep shuffling. Right. Forty-one years ago two dolphins came up Harbour Lane in the back of Dilys Pryce's pony cart, because the sea had gone off the quay and nobody in Porthcarrow could say why. Dilys was nine and had a bucket and a grudge against the vicar, so she tipped them into the old lido behind the chapel and that was that.

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The pair of them went round and round that lido like they were hunting for the way out. The smaller one kept stopping to lift its nose at the sky. Every night that August a star came sliding over the far side of the bay, trailing a blue ribbon behind it, and the little one would go leaping after it, clean out of the water. The big one never followed. It hung back by the steps and waited, the way my mother waited at the school gate with her arms folded, pretending she wasn't counting heads.

Nobody in the village wanted them moved. The council wanted them moved. Dilys wrote to the newspaper in green ink and signed it with a drawing of a fish. Then one September morning the lido was empty, the steps were wet, and there was a single silver scale stuck to the rail like a sixpence someone had forgotten to spend.

So if you walk the sea wall at dusk and a star drops out of the sky over the car park, don't bother wishing on it. Watch the water instead. You'll see the blue come up off the bay, and a grey nose break the surface to check you're still standing there.