Colour tattoo of blue, purple and teal fish-like scales shown through a torn-skin effect on a person's limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and purple scales under torn skin

Realism · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows rows of overlapping scales in blue, violet and teal, with soft shading that gives each scale a rounded, glossy edge. Ragged edges of skin appear to peel back at the top and bottom, revealing the scales beneath as if the skin has been split open. The colour is the main focus against a plain background, with the composition tightly framed on the tattoo.

Realism Scale Fish scale Mermaid Torn skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up the slipway at first light, torn open along its belly like a sack of wet bread, and Margit Hale knelt in the weed to see what had done it. Her knots were tight. She had tied every one herself the winter before. But the split did not look like rock or hook. The edges had peeled back in ragged flaps, and under the cord, where the mesh should have been dark with tar, something caught the grey light: rows of overlapping scales, violet and blue, with a teal that deepened toward the tail of the tear.

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Her father had always called such things sea-tales and told her to mind the tide tables instead. Margit minded the tide tables. She also minded the cold, the price of twine at Skerrow market, and the two boys from the chandler's who kept asking whether she would marry one of them before the herring left. She carried the net home, laid it across the kitchen table under the lamp, and began to sew the wound shut with waxed thread, one scale at a time, because the scales would not lie flat unless each one was held down.

By the third night her fingers were raw and the thread had run out twice. Every scale she closed seemed to shimmer brighter, as if the cloth were trying to breathe through the stitches. On the fourth morning she stopped, bit the last thread, and carried the net down to the water in both arms. She did not mend the split. She spread the net over the shallows and let the tide take its edges, and the scales lifted and shone in the green water like a shoal turning all at once.