Colour traditional-style tattoo of a fish with a bold black and red outline, grey-blue shading and yellow and orange markings, beside a skeleton tattoo on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fish tattoo with a red outline

Traditional · Colour · Photo

A stylised fish, likely a sardine or herring, fills the centre of the frame with a large black eye and a thick black outline with a red halo. The body is shaded in grey-blue with yellow and orange banding and fins, and the flat, bold linework is typical of traditional tattooing. Partial outlines of a glass, a bottle and a skeleton figure sit around it, suggesting other tattoos on the same skin.

Traditional Fish Eye Skeleton Bottle Glass

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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

Sit yourselves down, mind the bottle by your foot, that's not for you. Right. Harbour Court, the one with the lift that only went to the even floors, and on the ninth floor lived a widow called Nan Corrigan who kept a sardine on her windowsill in a jam jar of seawater. Nobody asked her why. The fish was grey along its back and gold along its belly, with an eye as black and round as a pub's last shilling, and it watched the stairwell every time anyone came up or went down.

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Her son Declan worked the fish market at dawn and came home stinking of brine and cheap whisky. Every Friday he brought her a tin of sardines, and every Friday she dropped the tin straight down the bin chute. She said it was a waste of a good fish. He said the fish was in the tin, and she said that was the trouble, a fish ought to be swimming, not queuing. They went at it like that for thirty years, the pair of them, over a sardine that had been dead since the Thatcher years.

Then the lift cable snapped in the February storm, and the whole block went quiet, and Declan, who had never once climbed those stairs without swearing, came up nine floors in the dark with a torch in his teeth. He found his mother sitting on the step with the jar in her lap. The water had gone cloudy. The sardine turned its one great eye on him, and he swore, and she laughed till she coughed, and that was the last time they ever argued about fish.