Colour tattoo of a teal and pink betta fish with swirling fins on the side of the torso, shown in a Realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Betta fish with flowing fins on the side

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A betta fish swims towards the lower left, with its scaled body shaded in teal and grey-green. Long, flowing fins in pink, red and turquoise sweep up and around the design, with fine linework picking out the fin rays. The soft, blended colour and shading give the piece a painterly finish against the skin, with a patterned fabric visible at the right edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fish had lived in the jar on Maud Tallis's sill for so long that the boys on the quay had stopped asking whether it was alive. It was a small thing, the colour of a mackerel's belly, and it hung in the water as if the water were a question it had no need to answer. Nobody in Skerrow thought much of it until the spring the herring failed.

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The men went out and came back with nets full of weed. Maud's husband had gone with them and did not come back. She carried the jar down to the harbour wall one grey morning, meaning to tip the fish into the sea and be done with its staring. When she pulled the lid off, the fish turned, and its fins opened like a bolt of silk shaken out in a wind, pink at the edges, then red, then a turquoise the fog could not swallow.

The fog lifted off the water in a long ribbon. Out past the breakwater a boat was circling blind, its lantern swinging in the murk. Maud watched the fins lay a road of colour across the swell, bright enough that the crew could steer by it. She did not wait to see whether they would.

The boat came in at noon. The men said a lady's silk had shown them the way, and nobody thought to contradict them. Maud kept the jar on the sill. The fish kept its own counsel, and when the boys asked her now whether it was alive, she only said yes.

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