Colour tattoo of blue, yellow and orange fish scales showing through a torn skin effect on the outer thigh.

Fish scales revealed through torn skin on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a fish tail's scales appearing through a rip in the skin, with the torn edges outlined in black and shaded in pinkish orange. The scales are rendered in blue, yellow and orange with soft shading and dark spots. The design is centred on the outer thigh and fills most of the frame against a plain skin background.

Neo-trad Thigh Fish Fish scale Torn skin Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are halfway up the cracked stair of Harrowmere Keep when the wall beside you splits and a cold smell of weed and rain comes through the gap. Your lantern gutters. Somewhere below, the moat the old lord drained forty winters ago is filling again, slow as a held breath.

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Your brother Tam told you not to touch the loose stones in the chapel. He said the masons sealed something in there when they raised the keep, a promise made to the river. You laughed at him. Now, prising at the mortar with your knife, you find a hollow lined with blue-green shards, each the size of a thumbnail and overlapping like roof tiles. The wall is not stone at all. It is skin gone hard with age, torn open where something longer than a man has been trying to climb out.

The shards shift when you lean closer. A yellow glint, then orange, then a blue so deep it looks wet. A fin lifts through the rip, edged in a rim of rust-pink flesh, and it does not look like a monster. It looks like a tired thing that has waited a long time for someone to notice the tear.

You could call Tam. You could run. Instead you set the lantern on the sill and press your palm flat against the scales, which are warm as a sleeping animal. Out on the water, the drowned chapel bell rings once. What the keep kept back all those years was never a secret. It was a door, and you have just knocked.