Back-angled photo of a green shaded fish scale tattoo on a person's ribs, with a fine black script quote above it.

Green scale pattern and script on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, wearing a black cloth draped over her shoulders and yellow and pink lace underwear. On her side above the hip sits a shaded green patch of overlapping fish scales, with a fine black script line above it reading "I still wish I could breathe under water". The scales are softly graded from darker to lighter green, and the script is set in the open space above the patch against a blurred indoor background.

Ribs Scale Fish scale Script Quote Water

Find an artist for this

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

Hush now, and leave that window alone, Dessie, the glass is cold enough to take the skin off your nose. Right. Where was I? Ah yes. Maisie Thorne lived on the fourteenth floor of Halvergate House, where the lift had been broken since the Jubilee, and every morning she walked all fourteen flights down to buy bread from the grocer's on the corner, and every morning she walked back up with the bread under one arm and her father's tin under the other.

Keep reading

The tin held fish scales. Green ones, the colour of bottle glass held up to a lamp. Her father had fished the Medway for forty years and never caught anything worth keeping, but he kept those scales, and when he went into the hospice he pressed the tin into her hands and said the sea was the only place a man could be quiet. She'd sit by the kitchen window with the tin in her lap and turn the scales over, one by one, and say the same thing to the glass every night. I still wish I could breathe under water. That was all. Just the wish, said plain, the way you'd say good night.

Then came the winter the river came up over the car park and into the bin store, and the council sent round a man with a clipboard to tell everybody to stay put. Maisie didn't stay put. On the Tuesday, the caretaker found a trail of wet green scales all the way up the stairwell, one flight at a time, glittering under the emergency lights like someone had dropped a necklace. The fourteenth-floor window was wide open, and the tin was sitting on the sill, empty.

Nobody ever found her, mind. But if you put your ear to the pipes on that landing, you can still hear her humming, slow and low, the way water hums in a kettle before it boils. And when the tide's high, the bath tap on the fourteenth floor coughs up one small bubble, green as anything, and then it goes quiet again. Now sit down, Dessie, and eat your crust before it goes stale.