Black and grey dotwork fish tattoo spanning the upper chest and shoulder, with fine geometric lines and wave-like fronds beside it.

Dotwork fish tattoo on chest and shoulder

Dotwork · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large fish is shown in profile across the upper chest and shoulder, with its eye and scales built from fine stippled dots and clean linework. Thin angular lines and frond-like shapes extend to the left and curl beneath the fish, with soft dotted shading on the waves. The fish is in black and grey, while the tattooed arm beside it includes coloured ink.

Dotwork Geometric Chest Shoulder Fish Wave Frond Geometric line Scale

Find an artist for this

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 river at Harrowgate had gone so low that summer the millers could walk across it in their boots, and the old pike that lived under the sluice gate had grown too proud to swim where anyone could see him. Mabry Lowe, who kept the weir for her uncle, found him there one morning with his jaw resting on the stones, his scales dull as pewter. She had brought a bucket of pond water and a loaf gone stale, and she set both down without a word, because her grandmother had taught her that you did not ask a proud thing what ailed it.

Keep reading

He did not thank her. Pike never thank anyone. But he let the water slop over the lip of the bucket and into the cracks where the river had dried, and on the third morning he rose up through the shallows and told her where the spring was hidden, under the roots of a fallen alder three miles up the valley. It ran cold and sweet, he said, and it was the only thing in the county that the drought had not yet thought to take.

Mabry walked the three miles with two yokes and a pair of hazel poles, and she carried back water in long bright arcs that the sun caught and broke into fronds of light across the mud. Each evening the pike rose to meet her and took his fill at the lip of the gate, and each evening the fine ripples he left behind spread out over the stones like the lines of a drawing that nobody had finished. By the first hard rain in September the weir was running again. The pike turned once in the brown water, slowly, the way a man turns to look at a field he has ploughed, and then he was gone downstream, and Mabry filled the last bucket and went home to her supper.