Realistic black and grey fish tattoo with orange and teal triangular shards, running down the back of a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fish with coloured shards on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A large fish is tattooed vertically down the back of a leg, with its tail at the top and its head near the ankle. The scales and fins are shaded in black and grey, with fine detail on the scale pattern and eye. Angular orange, teal and purple shapes overlay the body and extend into the background, adding colour against the grey.

Realism Calf Fish Scale Fin Eye Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Grimsby believed Mrs Abbot when she said the bream had swallowed a window. She had been sweeping the back step of the chapel, where the glazier left his offcuts to rot, and she swore she saw the fish take a triangle of ruby glass from the heap and turn with it, slow as a clock, toward the harbour mouth.

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By May the rumour had grown legs. A trawlerman said the fish had teal in its belly. A girl selling whelks said a violet shard under its fin rang against the pilings when it passed. Her grandfather, who had cut glass for the chapel before the war, only said the pieces were too sharp and too exact for any fish to carry, and that somebody had broken that window on purpose.

You went down to the quay that autumn with a clean net and a jam jar of sand, because you had decided the thing was yours to find. The water was brown and cold. The fish came up under the lamp, as long as your forearm, scales dark as slate, and it hung there while the light slid off the shards along its flank as if they were scales it had grown on purpose.

You didn't catch it. You knelt on the wet stone, held the net flat under the surface, and let the fish pass over it, orange, teal and violet, a whole sunset going out to sea. In the morning the chapel window was whole again, but the pane at the bottom left, where the red had always been, was blue now.