Black and grey Traditional style tattoo of a horned goat-like creature with a fish tail curling into an S shape, shaded on the inner forearm.

Horned goat-fish creature on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a horned, goat-like creature with an open, toothy mouth, its body tapering into a curled fish-like tail that forms an S shape. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading across the horns, face and body to give volume. The ink is almost entirely black and grey, with only faint warm tones near the eyes and belly, and the design fills the length of a pale forearm against a blurred background.

Traditional Forearm Goat Fish Horn Creature Monster

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

Don't reach for that windfall yet, Tom, not until I've finished, or the goat will hear you chewing. Sit where the shade drops off the Bramley trees. Now. Old Mabry kept the orchard above the weir, forty trees and a billy goat called Scathe, who had horns like a pair of sickles and a mouth full of teeth he was far too proud of.

Keep reading

One August the river dropped so low you could cross it on the stones to the mill. Mabry's wife said the water was thinking of leaving us altogether. Scathe went down to the pool below the weir every evening to drink, and every evening he came back a little more thoughtful, with a green shine on his beard and his lip curled up over those teeth like a man who'd been told a secret he shouldn't know.

Mabry followed him one dusk with a lantern. What he saw in the pool he never would describe, except to say that the goat's back end had come loose from the ground and was swimming, curling and uncurling like bracken in a wind, and that the scales caught the lantern light the way a knife does. Scathe bowed to the water. The tail swept round, the goat stepped down into it, and the two of them slid under the weir as neat as a stitch going through cloth.

Mabry came back up the bank with his lantern out and his hands empty. Next morning every tree on the north row was bent with fruit, and the goat was standing at the gate, grinning, chewing a fallen apple as if he'd never been further than the shade. That's the bargain, Tom. The river takes one thing a year and gives back twice what it's owed. Now, the windfall. Go on.