Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a grey-green fish with a dagger through it, set inside a red rope ring on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fish and dagger within a rope ring on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A fish in profile with an open mouth and a dagger driven down through its head sits inside a circle of red rope tied in a loop at the bottom. Three yellow drips fall from the dagger tip, and the fish has soft shading and a metallic sheen. Bold black outlines frame the design, and red, yellow and grey ink dominate against the bare skin.

Neo-trad Calf Fish Dagger Rope Circle Drip Blood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trout came up under the slip at Harrowgate Cove just as the tide turned, and my uncle Dessie swore it had been waiting for him all summer. He had the knife out before the line was properly taut, the old blade with the brass guard he'd won off a Lisbon sailor at cards. Nobody in Porth Wenna fished with a dagger. You gaff a fish, you don't stab it like a grudge.

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I held the rope while he worked. Coils of red tarred line hung from the bollard, the same rope that had tied every boat in the harbour since before the breakwater. He drove the blade down through the fish's skull, neat as a clerk signing for a parcel, and the thing went still in the water. Three drops of blood fell from the point onto the wet stones and he said, 'That's the tide's share.' I didn't ask what he meant.

Years later I found the knife in a drawer at the chandlery, wrapped in a page torn from the harbour log. The entry was in his square hand: trout, nine pound, taken on the ebb, rope cut and kept. Under it he had written one line I still can't read without my throat tightening, something about the sea owing a little back for every hook.

I tie a rope ring every morning now, knot at the bottom, and I keep the blade on the sill where the light catches the brass. The gulls know me. So does the trout, I like to think, though it has never once come up to look.