Small teal and yellow shaded fish-scale tattoo of overlapping arcs on the top of a foot, with white-tipped toenails.

Green scale pattern on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a bare foot resting on a dark grey surface, with white tips on the toenails. A small patch of overlapping fish-scale arcs sits on the side of the foot, drawn with dark teal outlines and soft shading. The scales fade from green and teal at the edges to pale yellow in their centres, and the design is shown against plain skin.

Other Scale Fish scale Pattern Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Aunt Nell,

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Father finally had the barge hauled out at Brentford, and the hull looks like something the river has been chewing on all winter. You'll remember the old green paint, the colour of pond water under a bridge. Half of it has gone. Where the boards were scraped back, Mr Okonedo from the yard showed me how the old shipwrights lapped each strake over the next, like the scales on a perch, so the water runs off rather than in. I asked why they never just painted everything flat. He said flat is what you do when you've stopped expecting the river to bite.

I spent three evenings with a tin of teal and a fine brush, working the outline of each scale along the wale until my wrist ached. Then I shaded them the way Mother shaded the pastry, darker at the rims, and let the middles go pale and yellow where the lamplight from the lock house caught them. Ben says it looks like a row of sunrises trying to climb out of the water. He is nine, so I took it as praise.

Last Tuesday the lower gates jammed on a drowned gull and the whole crew stood on the towpath swearing. I walked down to the sill and saw a pike hanging under the water, green and gold along its flank, watching us. It did not move once. When I climbed back up the bank, Father was grinning and holding a spanner he swears the same fish had returned to him from the sluice. I have stopped arguing with him about the river.

Write soon, and tell me whether the Thames has done the same to your roof.

Love, Maudie