Black and grey fish scale tattoo with small dots on the lower back, just above white underwear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fish scale tattoo on the lower back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo made of overlapping fish scales, arranged in a rounded cluster with scattered scales spreading outward. The scales are shaded in soft grey tones with darker edges, and a small round highlight with a dot sits in the centre. The skin is warm-toned and the background is out of focus, with the subject framed tightly around the tattoo.

Back Fish scale Scale Dot Pattern

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pa always said you could tell a good herring by the way its scales came off on your thumb, grey as wet slate and easy to lift. I was eleven the first time he let me scale at the bench behind the fish market in Mallow Cove, the gulls going mad over the offcuts and the tar softening in the sun outside the net loft.

Keep reading

The shed smelled of brine and paraffin. Every morning the boats came in low and heavy, and every morning I learned something new: how to run the blade back against the grain, how to hold a fish so the light caught its flank. The best scales overlapped like slates on the old chapel roof, and when I pressed one flat under my nail it held a small bright bead of water in the middle, the way a drop sits on a cabbage leaf after rain.

The summer Pa's boat went out and didn't come back, the harbour master sent word by a boy on a bicycle. I kept scaling. I scaled until my fingertips were grey and the bench was clean, and when Mrs Teague asked what I wanted for my trouble I told her nothing, only the tin of blue paint from the chandlery window.

I painted his little dinghy the next spring, and on its bow I set the scales he taught me, layered and shaded darker at the edges, with one drop of white at the centre where the light had landed. The dinghy is still tied at the quay. The tide still lifts it every evening, and I still count the scales on every catch that comes through the shed door.