Black ink dotwork tattoo of a fish riding a bicycle while smoking a cigarette, placed on the leg.

Fish riding a bicycle and smoking

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A scaled fish with a round eye and open mouth rides a bicycle, holding a cigarette from which a curling plume of smoke drifts up and to the right. The fish body is drawn with scale-pattern linework and stippled dot shading, while the bicycle frame and wheels use bold, even outlines. The design is in black ink only, set against pale skin with the subject centred on the limb.

Dotwork Other Fish Bicycle Cigarette Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had fallen on Sallow Market for nine days, and by the ninth the stallholders had stopped calling out to each other. Then a carp came pedalling along Mill Lane on a black bicycle, its mouth open and a cigarette held between its lips. The smoke curled up and to the right, and where it drifted the rain went thin and stopped. The boy minding Dorothy Pask's crockery stall dropped a plate, and the plate did not break.

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The carp stopped at the stall, leaned the bicycle against the crates and said, in a voice like wet paper, that it had come up from the mill pond for what was owed. Dorothy said nobody in Sallow owed a fish anything. The carp took one long pull on the cigarette and told her the sluice-keeper's family had shut the gate in her grandmother's day and sold the pond's rain by the bucket ever since. The rain belonged to the water, it said, and the water had been kept from its own sky long enough.

The stallholders argued, as stallholders do. The carp did not argue. It tapped its ash into the gutter, turned the bicycle round and rode back up the lane towards the sluice, smoke trailing behind it like a pennant. Dorothy's boy ran after it and found the gate standing open, the mill pond spilling grey sky over the cobbles.

The rain stopped at dusk and did not come back for a month. Dorothy sold every bootlace she had that week, and the boy kept watch on Mill Lane every wet Thursday after, hoping for a black bicycle and a thin plume of smoke above the roofs.