Colour tattoo of a trout above waves with the script words Gone Fishin' in Heaven, placed on the left ribs.

Gone Fishin' in Heaven on a rib

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A colour tattoo of a trout leaping above stylised blue waves, with the script words Gone Fishin' above and in Heaven below. The fish is shaded in gold, orange and red with grey detailing, and the lettering is bold black script. The design sits diagonally across the side of the ribcage against a plain skin background.

Lettering Ribs Fish Water Wave Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frank Oddie had fished the Wharfe for forty-one years and never once kept a trout he could not carry home in one hand. So when the council sent a man with a clipboard to say the weir was coming down, Frank bought a new reel and a tin of maggots and went to say goodbye to the pool below Ilkley bridge.

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His granddaughter Mabs came with him, sulking, because she had been promised chips. She sat on the wall with her feet swinging and counted the cars. Frank tied on a red-spotted fly his late wife had dressed for him, a thing he had never liked the look of, and cast it under the alders where the water went brown and quiet.

The trout rose on the third cast. It came up out of the shadow like a coin thrown the wrong way, gold flank, a flush of red along the gills, and hung in the air above the blue shimmer of the broken water. Mabs stopped swinging her feet. Frank did not reel in. He let the line go slack and watched the fish turn once, twice, and drop back into the pool without a splash.

"Did you get it?" Mabs said.

"No, love. It got away." He reeled in slowly, the way his wife used to say a man should when he has nothing left to prove. "Some things you let go of on purpose."

Mabs thought about this all the way to the chip shop, and then she asked whether fish went to heaven too, and Frank said that depended entirely on the fish, and on who was doing the casting.