Realism-style colour tattoo of a largebass leaping from water with a hooked lure, with a grey fisherman in a boat, across the upper arm and shoulder.

Leaping bass and fisherman on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large bass leaps from the water with its mouth wide open and a hooked lure at its jaw. Below and to the right, wooden pilings rise from the water, and a grey silhouette of a fisherman in a boat sits against a pale, cloudy blue sky. The fish is rendered in detailed, shaded colour, while the sky, pilings and figure are softer and more muted.

Realism Upper arm Fish Boat Cloud Sky Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the reservoir had seen a bass that size, and Alun Pryce had been telling them so for eleven years, which is why the lads at the boathouse had stopped listening to him by June. They called him the Admiral because he rowed out before light every morning in a grey wooden boat, sat square on the middle thwart, and talked to the water as if it owed him money.

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He rowed past the pilings every dawn. They were all that was left of the footbridge at Cwm Hollow, the valley village the council drowned in 1961, and his grandmother had crossed that bridge every Sunday to chapel with her shoes in her hand. Alun never looked at them long. He looked at the sky instead, which that morning was pale and streaked like the inside of a shell, and he cast the red-and-silver plug his father had carved from a piece of driftwood the year before the flood.

The strike came as a shove through the rod. The fish came out of the water all at once, a green-gold wall of gill and jaw, mouth open wide enough to swallow the oar, the plug flashing at the hinge of it. For one long breath it hung against the cloud with the pilings black below, and Alun, who had not been quiet in forty years, said nothing at all.

He did not reel. He let the line slacken, and the bass dropped back into its own reflection, shook its head once, and was gone under the stumps. Alun sat with the empty rod across his knees until the sun cleared the ridge. He never told anyone how big it was. The plug is on the shelf above his kettle now, its paint worn to bare wood where his thumb goes.