Pencil sketch of a goldfish with long flowing fins inside a circle, a fine line tattoo design shown in three stacked views.

Goldfish with flowing fins in a circle

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Three stacked pencil drawings show a goldfish with a scaled body and long, flowing tail and fins, set inside a circle with curving leaf or water shapes. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading on the scales and fins and no colour. The composition places the fish diagonally, with the fins sweeping across the circular frame.

Fine line Goldfish Fish Fin Circle Leaves Scale Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council man wanted the basin drained by Friday, so Edith Pryor went up through the nettles with a bucket and the fishing net she had not used since her brother died. The walls of Carrow still stood at the height of a man's shoulder on the east side, and inside the curtain there was nothing but sheep dung, ivy and the round stone basin where the chapel fountain had once run. The goldfish was still there. Nobody knew how it had lasted through three winters under ice.

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She had found it the spring the hall roof came down, a flash of orange beneath the duckweed, and she had fed it bread crusts ever since, saying nothing to the surveyors with their clipboards and measuring tapes. Its tail had grown long over the years, a veil of fins that drifted behind it like a curtain drawn back, and when it turned in the water the light through the cracked stone caught every ray.

She knelt at the rim and lowered the net. The fish did not run. It circled once, slowly, the way it always did, sweeping its fins round the edge of the basin as if tracing the old wall. Edith remembered her brother saying that a castle was only a ring of stones with the sky kept inside it, and she understood, with her knees soaked and the bucket tipping, that she had been guarding the wrong thing.

She carried it down the lane in a jug of pond water, past the gate and the sign that said Private, and tipped it into the mill race where the river ran wide and clean. The fish hung for a moment in the current, fins opening like a fan, then turned downstream and was gone. Behind her the basin sat full of ivy and sky, and nobody came to drain it.