Black ink drawing of a whale swimming through stippled waves beneath a starry night sky, set inside a circle, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Whale in a circle of waves and stars

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A whale swims through rippling, line-drawn waves inside a circular frame, with its tail rising at the left and its eye visible near the head. The upper half of the circle is a dark night sky dotted with small white stars and sparkles, while the body and tail are shaded with dense stippling. The drawing is in black ink on white paper, with fine parallel lines for the waves and dots for the shading.

Dotwork Whale Wave Star Night sky Circle Sea

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

Sit down by the range where I can see your face, and mind the kettle, because this is the one about Tobias Penrose and the whale that would not go home. It was the winter of 'fifty-three, the herring had gone out past the Gannet Rocks, and the boats came in empty every night for a month. Tobias was nineteen and had nothing to his name but a dinghy with a split strake and a mother who counted the tins in the pantry twice a day.

Keep reading

One night in February he rowed out alone, past the last buoy, because he could not bear to hear her counting. The sky had cleared the way it does only in that cold, every star pricked out hard as a pin through black card. The sea went long and silver, and he saw a grey back lift out of it, then another, and then the whole animal rose beside the boat so close he could hear it breathe through its crown like a man sighing over a cup of tea.

It did not sing, my father always said that. It only turned its great head toward the village lights, and the swell it made rolled under the dinghy and lifted it up the side of a wave that had no business being there on a windless night. Tobias held on. When the water set him down again he was facing the shore, and the whale was swimming off into the rippling dark, its tail raised once like a hand waved from a train window.

Next morning the nets came up heavy with herring, four hundred boxes, and Tobias's mother stopped counting. Nobody ever asked the lad where the shoal had come from. I reckon it had been waiting for someone to ask it nicely. Now get that cocoa down you, and mind the stars on the lane home, for they are watching.