Colour tattoo of a leaping fish in turquoise, pink and blue with black outlines and splatter dots, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaping fish on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large fish leaps upward across the thigh, with its head toward the top right and its tail curving down the leg. The outlines are bold and black, with loose speckled splatter marks around the body. The fish is filled with turquoise, pink and light blue washes that bleed past the linework, and the background is plain skin.

Thigh Fish Splatter Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the river at Lower Hatch ran high enough to drown a cart, and every spring old Nan Tully hung her linen to dry on the willows below the mill. She kept three pots going: woad for the blue, madder for the red, and a sour-smelling vat of whey and copper that gave a green nobody could name. The fish came up through all of it regardless, grey backs knocking against the stones of the weir.

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The travelling fair came through that May with a painted caravan and a boy who could juggle three eels. He wanted a colour for his mother's shawl that the river had never given him. Nan told him the only fish worth having was the one that jumped the weir, and that it would not be taken with a net. It would be taken by a man who stopped staring at it long enough to let it leap.

The boy stood on the bank all night. At first light a salmon went up the falls, turned over the lip of the stone, and its belly flashed as pink as madder while its back shone the turquoise of the copper vat, its fins smeared like wet paint through the spray. He dipped his hand in the water and it came up stained. He carried the shawl home that colour and never once told his mother where it came from.