Black and white photo of a fish skeleton tattoo on one calf and a stippled trout with lettering above it on the other, both worn with black leather shoes.

Fish skeleton and trout on calves

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos are shown on a pair of bare lower legs, with black leather shoes and dark socks above. The left calf carries a fish skeleton drawn with fine, clean outlines, and the right calf carries a trout shaded with stippled dots, with a line of lettering partly visible above it. The photograph is taken from above in black and white, with the shoes and legs filling most of the frame.

Calf Fish Lettering Leg

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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

You have been told the trout are gone since before your grandmother's grandmother, which is why the cistern under Halewood Yard should be empty, and why, when the sluice gate groans at dawn, you lower the lamp and see silver moving in the black water. Ada the warden says it is a trick of the mould. You say nothing and climb back up the ladder with your hands shaking, because your hands know what a fish looks like even if the rest of you has been taught otherwise.

Keep reading

The ledgers in the archive room are written in a hand you can barely read, all looped capitals and water stains. Among the ration tallies there is a page of drawings: a fish skeleton with every rib pinned out in ink like the frame of a boat, and beside it a plump trout with its scales dotted in fine stipple, as if the artist had rubbed a pencil with a thumb. Beneath them, a phrase half smudged away: PERIODE BLUE. You ask Ada what it means. She says it was a brand of tinned meat from before the Drowning, and that you should stop reading old rubbish.

That night you go back down with a bucket and a net made from the last of the cable. The trout is there, longer than your forearm, unbothered by you. You kneel at the edge and think about the skeleton on the page, how the old people drew the bones first, as though the body were only a coat thrown over them. You understand now what they were keeping. It was not the fish but its shape, so that someone would know it when it came back.

You do not catch it. You lie on the wet step and let the water soak your sleeve to the elbow, and you wait until the trout turns and slips under the arch toward the river. When you climb up, Ada asks if you found anything. You tell her the mould is mostly harmless, then go to the archive and sit with the drawing until the lamp burns out.