Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Blue and purple koi fish on a foot
Other · Colour · Photo
A white koi fish with purple patches and long, flowing blue fins swims across the top of a foot. The shading is soft and painterly, with smooth blending in the blues and purples and a clean, defined outline. The fish sits on the skin against a dark wooden background, with the foot filling most of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The boats came back to Skerrow Harbour every evening with empty nets, and Old Mairi said it was the fish's doing. Her grandson Tam laughed at her until the week the sea went flat and white as milk, when a koi the colour of frost came drifting along the harbour wall, its blue fins trailing behind it like smoke.
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Tam saw it first from the bow of the Brightwater. It turned in the green water, and the purple patches on its flanks flared like bruises healing. He reached for the gaff, then stopped. His grandmother had always said that a fish which comes to you in calm water is asking for something back, and nobody in Skerrow had ever learned what it wanted until it was too late to refuse.
He let it go. The next morning the nets were heavy enough to tear, and the whole fleet ran home singing. After that, on every trip, a pale fish with long blue fins rose beside the boat, circled once and sank again, and the men began leaving a heel of bread on the rail for it.
Tam kept the bread coming for forty years. When he finally went over the side in a February gale, the Brightwater came in with the tiller still lashed and a single purple scale caught in the rope. The harbour children still say that if you walk the wall at dusk, you can see a blue tail lifting out of the swell, waiting for its bread.
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