Celtic knotwork salmon leaping
Black and grey · Flash
A pencil drawing of a salmon leaping upwards, with its head open and a small bubble above it. The body and fins are filled with interlaced Celtic knotwork, while the tail and scales are finished with dotted and hatched shading. The design is drawn in graphite greys on a pale background, with the composition running diagonally from the top left to the lower right.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The salmon came up the Lenn every October, and the signalman at Carrow Bridge halt swore it timed its leaps to the 4.12 out of Dunmore. Nobody believed him until the fish hung above the weir beside the platform edge, jaw open as if it meant to speak, a single bubble rising past it like a stray thought.
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I was nineteen that autumn and sweeping the platform because my aunt ran the buffet and I owed her. Ewan Mackie kept a tin of sharpened pencils in his box and drew everything: the gulls, the weir, the wet slate roofs of the village. He called the river a knot-tier, because it looped back on itself under the bridge and never quite let go of the bank. He showed me a sheet where a salmon was bound in ribbon, each loop running into the next, so you could not tell where the fish stopped and the water began.
The next October Ewan was not in his box. The 4.12 pulled in while I stood with my broom, and a salmon broke the surface below the bridge, twisting through its own bright tangle of light. I did not see it land. I only saw the bubble lifting off the water, and I thought of his tin of pencils, and I counted the loops as the train took the bend.
I still have his drawing. The fish is leaping upward, and the tail trails off the edge of the paper, as if it had decided the page was far too small.
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