Black and grey shaded fish scale tattoo on a person's hip, with the edge of white underwear visible below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fish scale tattoo on a hip

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a cluster of shaded scales on the hip of a person wearing white underwear. The scales are drawn as overlapping rounded shapes with soft grey shading that fades toward the edges of the design. The warm skin tone and blurred background of household items keep the focus on the tattoo.

Other Fish scale Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has taken the lower courtyard again, so you wade the last stretch with your boots in one hand, past the drowned arch where the old kitchen used to be. Gulls lift from the broken keep as you pass, and below them the sea shows its grey back, scaled over with light.

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Mrs Gilchrist kept the slates of Carrick Hold for forty years, and she told you the roof had once been fish. Not literally. Each slate had been cut by a mason from the Ardnish quarry, shaped like a scale and laid over its neighbour the way a herring's flank lies. When the great storm of 1897 peeled them off, they went over the cliff in a clatter, and the sea carried them out across the shingle until they settled in the shallows like a shoal that had forgotten how to swim.

You find one on the rocks at low water, grey and softened at its edges where the weather has worn it, and you turn it over in your palm. Someone has scratched a tally on the back: seven short strokes and a cross. Then a second, a third, a whole row of them. It is a count of something, a debt perhaps, or the days someone waited for a boat that never came in.

You slip the slate into your coat pocket and climb back up the cliff path with the tide at your heels. At the top the wind combs the grass flat. You take it out and set it on the wall where the roof once met the sky, and the low sun lies across it, and for a moment the stone looks ready to slide off the edge and swim home.