Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a green and blue fish tail curling through black-outlined waves on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green and blue fish tail with waves

Japanese · Other · Colour · Photo

A fish with a scaled green and blue tail curls through stylised wave shapes outlined in black. The scales and fins are shaded in teal and green, with small bubbles and dark grey wave details around the edges. Bold black linework frames the design against the pale skin, which fills most of the frame.

Japanese Other Fish Koi Wave Water Scale Bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already turned when Maud Pellow saw the tail for the third evening running, lifting out of the green chop beside the lifeboat slip like a sail being shaken loose. She was sixty-one and had gutted herring on that quay since before the marina went in, and she knew a trick of the light when it came. This was no trick. The scales caught the lamp above the chandlery and threw it back in teal and bottle-green, and the water around it boiled white, then smoothed, then boiled again.

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Her grandfather had called it the Tidy Carp, a joke that stopped being funny the winter his boat went over off Dungeness. He used to say a fish that size was never lost, only owed. Maud had not believed him. She fed the thing anyway, the way you feed a neighbour's cat, tossing crusts of Sunday loaf onto the water and watching the spray curl up in little grey fists that broke and fell apart like wet paper.

On the fourth night she brought no bread. She sat on the cold bollard with her knees pulled up and her coat buttoned to the throat and said out loud that the sea had taken her husband and her brother and most of the herring, and that she was not paying anything more. The waves stood still. Then the tail rose, slow as a bell rope, and something cool and heavy settled on the stone by her boot: one scale, the size of a thumbnail, still wet and blazing green.

She kept it in her purse for thirty years. It was never owed, she decided, only given, and that was harder to carry.