Traditional colour tattoo on a thigh showing a teal whale, red flowers and the words DON'T PANIC in black lettering.

Whale and flowers with Don't Panic lettering

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A teal whale with a yellow-shaded belly swims across the thigh, surrounded by red five-petal flowers and falling red petals. The words DON'T PANIC sit above in black capitals with raindrop-like strokes beside them, and a dark grey curled shape sits below the whale. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills give it a classic traditional look, with colour dominating the design.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Whale Flower Petal Raindrop Lettering Horseshoe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hennie Vell had the last of the Blenheim drops picked and the ladder still against the old Bramley when the drought broke, not with rain but with a whale. It came up the dry brook at the bottom of Coldharbour orchard, grey-blue and steaming, and lay in the lower field with its tail caught in the hedge as though somebody had ordered it.

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The village gathered at the gate. Ansel Pike said a whale in a dry year was bad luck and went to fetch the horseshoe he kept nailed over the cider press. Mrs Gorse, who had buried two husbands and kept a notebook of weather, only said, "Don't panic," the same as her mother had said through every flood and fire, and she chalked it on the barn board so the children would see it. Red petals came drifting down out of the trees though it was not blossom weather, and the whale breathed out a fine rain that smelt of windfalls.

Hennie climbed down and walked out across the stubble with a bruised apple in her pocket. The whale's eye was wet and patient. It did not take the apple. It turned its great head towards the bramble at the bottom of the field and waited, and when she followed it, she found the spring that had hidden under the roots all summer, now bubbling up cold between the stones.

By dusk the brook was running full, the whale had gone back down into the water the way it came, and Mrs Gorse's chalk had washed off the barn board, leaving only a grey smear. Ansel hung the horseshoe back over the press, dry as biscuit, and nobody mentioned the whale again. Every September since, the Blenheims have come in heavier than any year before.