Realistic blue and green fish scale tattoo across a person's shoulder and upper arm, with small water droplets on the scales.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue fish scale tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows overlapping fish scales in blue, teal and green, each with a shaded edge and highlight that gives a three-dimensional look. Several small droplets sit on the scales, and a faint reddish area of skin surrounds the upper edge of the design. The tattoo runs down the shoulder and upper arm against a dark background, with a purple strap crossing the skin.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Fish scale Scale Droplet Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first thing my father-in-law did when the boat came in was count the scales on the catch, as if the sea owed him an accounting. Ten to a finger, he always said, and a finger for every year the Gull had held her line. Nobody in Porthgwidden argued with him about it. You didn't argue with a man who could tell a pilchard's age from the sheen on its back.

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I took the blue skiff out myself the winter Tomas went down with his chest. Nobody else would crew for a widow's worth of nets, so I learned the knots by feel and the tides by the taste of the wind. The water off the point is never one colour for long. Some mornings it lies flat as tin, then it stacks itself into pewter ridges the length of a street, and the light breaks on each ridge like a scale lifting. I started keeping a tally of those lifts in the back of the logbook, in pencil, because pencil does not drown.

In March the nets came up heavy with nothing but weed and one small grey mackerel that had tangled itself into a knot. I was going to throw it back, but it had a mark behind its gill, a bright green smudge like a thumbprint in paint, and when I turned it over the sea ran off its flank in beads that caught the lamp. I held it up to the lantern and counted, out of habit. Eleven rows, overlapping, each one lit from its lower edge.

I took it home, cleaned it in the sink, and laid it on the windowsill to dry. My father-in-law came in, looked at it a long time, and said, "That one's been somewhere." Then he took the pencil from behind my ear and wrote a new number at the bottom of the log: one more, and it was mine.