Three-panel photo of a colour Japanese-style forearm tattoo showing a blue horned sea serpent, red fish and outlined waves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue sea serpent and red fish on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm and shows a blue horned, sea serpent-like creature with its mouth open, above a red fish with orange fins. Grey outlined waves and foam wrap around the designs, and the three panels show the front, back and side of the arm. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with colour ink dominating the design.

Japanese Forearm Fish Wave Water Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the gulls can't get at your chips, boy, and I'll tell you about the spring the Skerrow nets came up full of red, and what rose out of the water to see who had taken them.

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Old Amos Teague had the Corrie Rose, and he was the only man in Skerrow who would drop his lines inside the Tooth, the reef off the point where the tide goes white even in a flat calm. Everyone said the serpent lived there. Blue as a bruise, horns like a bull's, a mouth wide enough to take a dinghy whole. Nobody had seen it closer than a hundred yards, because the men who did were never asked about it again.

Amos saw it. He told the harbour master it was a grey morning, sea like pewter, and the water beside the Corrie Rose split open. The thing rose slowly, pushing a wall of foam ahead of it, and its jaw hung wide with a noise like a rusted hinge. Lodged between its teeth, where a man's last meal would be, was a little red fish no longer than his hand, with orange fins flared like a lantern. It was singing, or screaming, or both.

Amos did what a fool would do. He leaned over the rail, lifted the fish from the serpent's mouth, and dropped it in his bucket. The serpent did not eat him. It studied him a long while with eyes the colour of a storm, then sank back beneath the Tooth without a ripple, and the swell it left curled grey around the boat all the way into harbour.

The fish lived three summers in a jar on the cottage windowsill. Then one night in November the sea came over the wall and the Corrie Rose went under, and the bucket was never found. Some say that's the serpent keeping accounts. I say the fish simply went home.