Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a humpback whale filled with floral mandala patterns, on the side of the torso.

Whale with floral pattern on the side

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A whale swims across the skin, with its body filled in fine stippled dots and decorated with flower heads, swirls and small paisley-like motifs. The linework is crisp and the shading is built from dense dots along the belly and pectoral fin. The image is entirely black and grey and is framed closely on the side of the torso.

Dotwork Botanical Ribs Whale Flower Mandala Swirl Dot Floral pattern

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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

No, sit nearer the fire, the wood's damp and the tale is long, and you will want your wits for the middle of it. You ask about the whale who carried the gardens. The sea off Caddow Reach was grey as a slate roof in those days, and the villagers there had forgotten how to plant anything, for the salt wind takes every seed before it can root. Then one spring a whale came in past the breakwater, old and slow, and she lay down in the shallows the way a tired woman sits on a bench at the end of market day.

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The children of Pell Harbour climbed onto her back to see her, and they found her hide was not hide at all but a lace of tiny dots, thousands upon thousands, pressed into her skin like the pattern on a widow's shawl. Where the dots were thickest there bloomed great flower heads, and curling swirls like fern fronds, and small teardrop shapes that the old women said were seeds waiting for their season. Mab Torrin, who mended nets and never once raised her voice, sat on the whale's fin and pressed her palm to the warm dots and said, you are the only thing in this kingdom that ever planted anything for free.

King Idris the Thrifty heard of it and rode down to the shore with his bailiffs and a harpoon taller than a man. He wanted her oil for his lamps and her bones for his hall. The whale turned her great head toward him, slow as a cathedral bell, and every dot along her flank lit gold for a moment, and the ledger pages he carried under his arm sprouted cornflowers from their margins and would not be read.

He lowered the iron, the bailiffs swear it, though none of them saw him throw it. The whale slid out past the reef with a wake full of petals, and by spring the harbour wall had split open with daisies. Caddow has no whale oil now, only cornflowers in the window boxes and a king who will not say her name.