Black fine line tattoo of a tail fin with dotwork shading on the back of a lower leg, just above the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line tail fin tattoo on lower leg

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A single outlined tail fin design runs down the back of a lower leg, close to the ankle and heel. The linework is thin and black, with a few small dots and stippled dotwork shading along the lower section. The tattoo sits in the centre of the frame against pale floor tiles, with the foot visible at the bottom.

Fine line Dotwork Calf Fin Dot Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stream came down off the pass in a hurry that spring, carrying the last of the snow in brown ropes over the stones, and my grandmother said the trout would come up it whether we liked it or not. I was nine and had been told to keep my boots out of the water. Instead I sat on the warm rock below the cairn with a tin of barley sugar and watched the pool at the bend, where the current folded back on itself like a sheet being shaken out.

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A fish came up the chute that afternoon, not a trout but something longer and darker, its tail fanning out like the sail of a boat in a gale. It hit the lip of the falls and slid back. It hit again. Each time it left a spray of small bright drops on the slate, and I counted them because counting was what I did when I was frightened. Twenty-two on the third try. Then the tail found a purchase in a crack under the water and the whole body slid up and over, and it was gone into the upper pool before I could stand.

My grandmother laughed when I told her. She said the pass had always had a fish in it that nobody caught, and that it went up to the high tarn to lay its eggs and came down again in autumn, thinner and wiser. I asked how she knew. She pointed at the wet stones along the path, where a line of dots ran all the way to the top of the pass, each one the size of a lentil, each one holding a little sky.

I went up with her the next morning. At the tarn the water was so still it was hard to say where the sky stopped, and something moved under the surface, a slow sweep of dark fin, leaving a ring of silver dots that spread and spread until they reached the shore.