Colour tattoo of a brown trout with orange belly and dark spots, shown in a neo-traditional style on the forearm, with a close-up detail of the head below.

Brown trout on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A brown trout swims across the forearm in a side profile, with an orange belly, olive-green fins and dark and reddish spots along the flank. The outlines are bold black with stippled shading on the head and gill plates, and the scales are suggested with layered curved lines. The top photograph shows the full fish against a red background, and the lower close-up shows the head and eye in more detail.

Neo-trad Forearm Fish Spots Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down and mind the bench, it's still black from the tip. You'll have heard about the trout under Pantglas bridge, the one with the copper belly and spots scattered like shot on a wet slate. Nobody fished for her. Old Emrys Vaughan tried it the hungry winter of thirty-one, with a worm and a rusted hook, and she rose to look at him, one gold eye ringed like a sovereign, then slid back under the brown water where the pit runoff ran.

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Llwyn Colliery drank the brook dry every spring, pumping the galleries and leaving the stream the colour of stewed tea. Emrys had a boy, Tomos, twelve years old, who went down the shaft that summer because the men were short and a wage was a wage. Each evening, so the women said, the trout followed the pit's outflow past the sluice, her fins green as bracken, and watched the lads come up blackened and grinning.

The night the roof came in at the Number Three level, the water rose faster than the pumps could shift it. Tomos was below with six others. Emrys stood on Pantglas bridge with a lamp, and the trout came up under the light, spots bright as coins, and turned her head towards the hill where the old drift ran. He followed her along the bank. Where the stream vanished under the tip there was a gap in the dry stone that no man had known about, and the men walked out through it one by one with the water at their heels.

Tomos came out last, carrying nothing but a dead lamp. His father asked where the fish had gone. He said she was still down there in the stream, looking at them, waiting to see if anyone would say thank you. So Emrys leaned over the parapet and said it to the water, and that is the only time I ever heard a Vaughan thank anything. Now pass that jug along before it turns.