InkCraftWhale Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning
12 original whale designs drawn for InkCraftBy Uladzimir TumanauUpdated
Whales are worn for family, song and depth, and this set runs from a single-line humpback to a pale sperm whale, Melville's species, diving head first. A swimming whale is a horizontal animal, so along a forearm it lies level only when the arm is held out.
Black and grey polynesian whale tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey polynesian whale tattoo design
Black and white linework whale tattoo design, outline stencil Try it on — Black and white linework whale tattoo design, outline stencil
Black and grey dotwork whale tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey dotwork whale tattoo design
Color Japanese whale tattoo design Try it on — Color Japanese whale tattoo design
Black and grey dotwork whale and ocean tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey dotwork whale and ocean tattoo design
Black and grey illustrative whale and ocean tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey illustrative whale and ocean tattoo design
Color watercolor whale and mother and child tattoo design Try it on — Color watercolor whale and mother and child tattoo design
Color neo traditional whale and narwhal tattoo design Try it on — Color neo traditional whale and narwhal tattoo design
Black and white blackwork whale and orca tattoo design Try it on — Black and white blackwork whale and orca tattoo design
Black and grey illustrative whale and lighthouse tattoo design Try it on — Black and grey illustrative whale and lighthouse tattoo design
Color watercolor whale and galaxy tattoo design Try it on — Color watercolor whale and galaxy tattoo design
Color flash whale and octopus tattoo design: a scallop shell, a jellyfish and a seahorse Try it on — Color flash whale and octopus tattoo design: a scallop shell, a jellyfish and a seahorse
Tap any design to see it on your own skin in the try-on — no signup.
This set of 12 whale designs, by the numbers
- Styles represented
- dotwork (2), illustrative (2), watercolor (2), polynesian (1), linework (1), japanese asian (1)
- Black-and-grey vs colour
- 58% black-and-grey, 42% colour
- Most often drawn with
- ocean, mother and child, narwhal, orca
Counted from the 12 designs shown on this page. Every one was drawn for InkCraft — none are scraped or reposted. Free to reference with a link to this page.
What a whale tattoo means
The first thing a whale says is size without menace. The blue whale is the largest animal known to have lived, and it feeds on krill a few centimetres long, so the image is strength that never needs to be used: something enormous and in no hurry. It is also an animal people decided to stop killing. The International Whaling Commission's pause on commercial whaling took effect in 1986, and a whale can be worn for something saved.
The second is family. A humpback calf keeps to its mother's side for about a year, nursing the whole time, which is why the watercolour mother and calf here is chosen by new parents and by daughters for their mothers. Orcas go further: among the fish-eating residents of the north-east Pacific, sons and daughters alike stay in their mother's group for life, so a pod really is a family travelling together.
Song is the third, and the newest. In 1970 the biologist Roger Payne put out Songs of the Humpback Whale, the record that helped start the Save the Whales campaigns, and in 1977 whale song went onto the Voyager Golden Record among the greetings from Earth. Its shadow is the 52-hertz whale, a single animal first picked up on US Navy hydrophones in 1989, calling at a pitch no other whale seems to answer. A whale beside the number 52 is a tattoo about going unheard, and for many fans of BTS it also points to their 2015 song Whalien 52.
The oldest reading is the belly. Jonah spends three days inside a great fish before it spits him out onto dry land, and English Bibles, the King James among them, call it a whale in the Gospel of Matthew, so the whale became the ordeal a person goes into and comes out of. Worn for that, it marks a bad stretch survived.
Where the design comes from
Sailors knew the whale as the island that was not one. In the Navigatio of Saint Brendan the Irish abbot and his monks keep Easter on the back of the whale Jasconius, and the whale here carrying a lighthouse and pines on a rocky island descends from that story. The whaling century gave it menace: in 1820 a sperm whale sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex, and Herman Melville built Moby-Dick (1851) partly on that account. In Japan, Utagawa Kuniyoshi's triptych of about 1847 shows Miyamoto Musashi stabbing a giant whale from its back; the navy whale here, its spout curling into wave scrolls, borrows from such prints rather than from the irezumi repertoire.
Choosing yours
- Settle the species first, because each whale is a different outline: a humpback has flippers up to a third of its length, a sperm whale a square block of head over wrinkled skin, a narwhal a spiralled tusk, an orca a pattern of black and white. The Polynesian tail and the rising fluke leave the body out.
- Then decide which way it moves. A swimming whale is a horizontal animal, so the watercolour pair or the narwhal wants the collarbone, the upper back or a forearm; the diving sperm whale and the breaching humpback are vertical and run down a calf or the spine.
- The orca's white patches are bare skin inside solid black, and small openings shrink as black spreads over the years, so give them more room than the anatomy strictly allows.
Size, cost and placement
How big, and what it costs
The one-line humpback and a small fluke are shop-minimum work at 4 to 7 cm; the blackwork orca at 8 to 10 cm takes about an hour, the watercolour pair or the narwhal at 12 to 15 cm two to three. Stipple is slow, so the diving sperm whale runs four hours or more, and the island whale or the Edo-print whale at 20 cm is a full day.
Where it sits, and how much it hurts
Swimming whales lie best across the collarbone or the upper back; along a forearm one lies level only with the arm held out. A tail alone fits the ankle or behind the ear. The spine and collarbone hurt more than the forearm or calf.
What to ask your artist
- Whether the outline follows the species you mean: flippers, head and markings.
- How large the orca's white patches must be to stay open at your size.
- How many turns of spiral the narwhal's tusk can hold at your size.
Prices vary widely by city and artist — treat these as session lengths rather than quotes, and expect a shop minimum on anything small. The cost guide turns hours into money by size, placement and style.
Common questions
Is an orca really a whale?
It is the largest member of the dolphin family, itself among the toothed whales, so both names are fair. On the Northwest Coast the killer whale is also a crest held by particular Haida and Tlingit lineages and drawn in formline; the blackwork orca here is drawn from the animal instead.
Can a tail be copied from one particular whale?
Yes. The black and white pattern under a humpback's flukes differs from whale to whale, and researchers identify individuals by photographing it, so a fluke traced from a whale you saw dive is accurate and yours.
Is the narwhal's tusk a horn?
No, a tooth, usually the left canine, growing through the upper lip in a spiral up to about three metres long. Medieval traders sold tusks as unicorn horn, and the Danish coronation chair at Rosenborg Castle, made between 1662 and 1671, is built of them.
Is the Polynesian whale tail a traditional design?
It borrows the shared vocabulary of Pacific tattooing, triangles, spearheads and Māori koru curls, and is decoration rather than anyone's tatau or moko. For Māori the whale carries Paikea, the Ngāti Porou ancestor who rode one ashore, as told in Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider (1987).
See it on your skin before you commit
InkCraft places any of these designs on a photo of you — scaled, wrapped and shaded to the placement you pick.