Blue fish scale tattoo on the top of a foot, shown through a torn skin effect in a realistic style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue fish scales through torn skin on a foot

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a foot with a blue tattoo of fish scales showing through a ripped opening in the skin. The scales are shaded in tones of blue and teal, with a dark outline around the tear and red shading along its edges to suggest torn flesh. The composition frames the foot diagonally against a pale green surface, with the toes visible at the lower right.

Realism Other Fish scale Torn skin Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marine Ballroom on the Friday night Tom Pelling came up the promenade with his skin split open was the loudest it had ever been, because nobody could decide whether to dance or to stare. Along the tear the flesh was red and raw, and beneath it lay scales, blue as a mackerel's back, overlapping in neat rows that caught the light from the mirror ball.

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Tom did not limp. He crossed the floor to where I stood by the cloakroom hatch and asked me for a waltz, which seemed a fair enough request for a man in his condition. "The sea wants it back," he said, "and it'll have it by Michaelmas unless somebody dances with me." I had known him since we were children on the groyne, and I had never once known him to lie.

We danced to Ted Heath's band, slow and careful, while the scales rasped against my glove like wet shingle. Nobody else came near us. The couples parted around us the way the tide parts round a post, and the drummer kept his brushes soft the whole way through.

At the last chord he pressed a scale into my palm, pearl-grey and no bigger than a fingernail, and walked out into the rain without his coat. By morning the tear had closed. I still keep the scale in the biscuit tin with the cloakroom tickets, and on wet nights it is warm, as if something under the promenade is still keeping time.