Black and grey tattoo of a scaled fish smoking a cigarette and riding a bicycle, with dotwork shading, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fish riding a bicycle and smoking

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A scaled fish with a wide eye and open mouth rides a bicycle, with a cigarette between its lips and a curl of smoke rising above it. The design uses bold outlines, fine hatching on the scales and stippled dots for shading and the smoke. The image is a close crop of the leg against a plain pale background, with the bicycle wheels sitting at the bottom of the frame.

Dotwork Blackwork Calf Fish Bicycle Cigarette Smoke Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit, mind the dog. You've not heard about the carp at the Haddow wedding? Then pour the wine first, because it's a long one and my throat is older than the canal.

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Brannoch was a carp who lived under the lock gates at Sallow Bend, with one wide, surprised eye that never once in forty years looked like it expected good news. He'd won a second-hand bicycle off a bargeman at cards, a black iron thing with a bell that rang on its own whenever the wind turned. Every evening he pedalled the towpath with a hand-rolled cigarette clamped in his lips, blowing rings at the herons, because a fish who wants to be taken seriously must look like he has somewhere to be.

The Haddow girl was marrying a mill clerk that Saturday, and the whole parish sat under a striped marquee on the water meadow. Brannoch arrived late, wheels hissing through the wet grass, his smoke rising in a tall grey curl above the wedding cake. The bride's mother told him to leave. He asked her to dance. She refused, so he rode three slow circles round the bride, very dignified, with the bell ringing the whole time, and nobody could tell whether they were laughing or weeping.

When he finally pedalled back to the lock, the stars were out and the bicycle was still ticking. Some say the bride's mother sent the last slice of cake home with him. Some say he never came back at all. I say the smoke is still up there if you look, drifting over Sallow Bend, and that is where he went, puffing his way towards something finer than a wedding. Now, who's for more wine?