Back of a person's neck and shoulder showing a blue fish-scale tattoo that runs up the side of the neck, with the head turned away from the camera.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue scale tattoo on the neck

Neck · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person's neck and upper back, with brown hair pulled to one side and a thin silver chain across the shoulders. A tattoo of overlapping blue scales runs diagonally up the side of the neck, with each scale outlined and shaded to suggest depth. The tattoo is in colour, set against pale skin and a blurred green background.

Neck Scale Fish scale Pattern

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fish came in on the morning of my brother's wedding, which Mam said was either luck or a warning, depending on whether you had been up since four. Dad had hauled a pollack the length of my arm out of the nets at Porthkennack, and its scales were so blue under the wet sun that nobody on the quay wanted to gut it. I was the one who got stuck with it.

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I scraped the scales off with the back of a knife, the way Gran taught me, and they came away in sheets, each one thin as a fingernail and edged with a silver line. I kept a handful in my apron pocket. By the afternoon the church hall smelled of lilies and hot sugar, Tom's new wife was laughing too loudly by the window, and I kept touching the pocket as if the scales might have spread to my hands.

At the reception somebody's speech went on too long, so I slipped out to the harbour wall. The tide was on its way out, leaving the steps wet and bright. I set the scales along the top of the wall in a row, overlapping, the way they had lain on the fish, and the evening light caught them one by one until they looked like a path someone had laid for another person to walk down.

Tom found me there with his tie undone. He asked what I was doing, and I said I was counting. He sat beside me and didn't ask what, and after a while we tipped the scales into the water together, watching them drift out past the slipway, catching the last of the sun like a dropped string of coins going home.