Traditional style colour tattoo of a blue-spotted stingray with orange ringed spots and black outlines, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue-spotted stingray on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stingray with a long curling tail is tattooed in bold traditional style, with thick black outlines and orange-ringed spots on its dark body. The wings are filled with teal, turquoise and cream shading, with stippled dots along the edges. Partial dark tattoos are visible at the edges of the frame, and the plain white paper backdrop keeps the focus on the central design.

Traditional Upper arm Fish Sea creature Tail Spots

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea came over the seawall on the second night of the new year, and by morning Harrow Marsh Farm was an island with a barn on it. Dafydd waded out to the ewes at first light, boots full of cold, and the water was still moving the way it did when it wanted something back.

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He found the stingray in the lee of the feed trough, stranded where the flood had dropped it among the hay bales. It was the size of a dinner tray, dark as wet slate on top, with orange rings round its spots as if someone had pressed coins into ink. Its tail curled behind it in one long question mark, and its wings still breathed, slow and wide.

Nan Ffion came down the lane in her wellingtons with a bucket and a face that had seen worse floods. She didn't fuss. She knelt in the slurry, slid a hessian sack under the animal, and told him the sea had a habit of sending back what it couldn't keep. "Tide'll be up again by four," she said. "Take it to the channel before it stiffens."

They carried it between them across the field, water to their shins, the tail dragging a thin line through the silt. At the gully Dafydd tipped it in. It turned once, a flash of cream and teal underneath, and was gone under the grey. Nan wiped her hands on her coat. "There," she said. "Now the field's got something to remember us by." He never told her he had counted the spots, all twelve of them, the way you count the stars you know you will not see again.