Japanese style fish tattoo with red scales and black linework on a calf, with a black paisley sneaker resting on a metal rail.

Fish tattoo on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A lower leg is shown with a large tattoo of a fish or similar creature, its body built from red scale shapes outlined in black. Black flowing shapes and bold linework fill the space above and around the design, which runs from the calf down toward the ankle. The sneaker and blurred orange and grey background sit out of focus, with the tattoo as the main subject.

Japanese Calf Fish Scale Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The koi had been swimming upstream since before the harbour wall was built, and Maeve Corrigan was tired of watching it. Every dawn she stood on the net drying ground at Port Eskdale and counted the red scales that flared when the light hit them, forty-one one morning, forty-three the next, as if the fish were keeping its own tally of who had stayed ashore.

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Her father had sworn the creature lived in the black water beneath the pier, that it came up only when a boat went out short-handed. The crews laughed at him over their tea, but nobody laughed on the morning the Brightwater failed to return. Maeve went down to the slip with a coil of rope and found the fish waiting in the shallows, its gills working slowly, its fins spread wide like the flared sails of a wherry.

She followed it out past the breakwater in her uncle's skiff, the oars slapping the swell, the paint on the transom flaking off like old skin. The fish never once looked back. It simply moved through the grey waves as though it were pulling a line that only it could feel, and where the water turned the colour of pewter, she saw the Brightwater riding low on her side, her crew waving rags from the bow.

They towed her home with the tide behind them. When Maeve climbed onto the slip, soaked to the elbows, the water beside the pier was already still again. Her father stood at the top of the steps with his cap in his hands, and for once he said nothing at all, only nodded toward the sea as if the fish had kept its end of some old bargain.