Full back tattoo in Japanese style showing a leaping striped bass over rolling blue waves, with an anchor and an orange sunburst behind it, on a man's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaping striped bass and anchor on a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo covers the whole back, centred on a striped bass leaping upward with its mouth open. Behind it an anchor and chain sit within turbulent teal and blue waves, with grey and black clouds and an orange sunburst above. The fish has detailed scale and stripe shading, while the waves and clouds use bold outlines and a traditional Japanese-influenced composition.

Japanese Realism Back Fish Anchor Wave Cloud Sunburst Chain

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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

The function room at the Harbour Hotel still smells of wet carpet and the lemon polish Mrs Garvey used on the gym floor in 1994. Dougie Pryce has brought a photograph in a plastic wallet, the kind you keep a bus pass in, and he is holding it up to anyone who will stand still long enough to look. It shows a striped bass hanging in the air, mouth open, the sea torn white around it.

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He says that is ours, tapping the glass, the August we hooked it off the old breakwater. He is right, but not in the way he thinks. We were fifteen and had dragged a rusted anchor off the shingle to use as a sinker. When the bass came up out of the surf it rolled twice in the air like something fired from a gun, and the line tore through Dougie's palms until the skin stayed on the reel. The chain swung and clanged against the rail like a church bell. Then the hook pulled free and the fish went back into the green water, and we sat on the stones laughing and bleeding and saying nobody would believe us.

Nobody did. Mr Ashworth, who taught us geography and later went under in his own bath, told us to stop lying and sit down. Dougie kept the anchor in his dad's shed for years. Tonight, after the second pint, he admits the photograph came from a magazine in a dentist's waiting room, and that he cut out the fish and pasted it onto the only picture of us he still had.

I think about that for a while. Then I walk out through the fire door to the car park, where the sky above the roofs has the orange glow of a sunrise that has got its times wrong. Dougie follows me out with the wallet in his hand and says the stripes are the only part he got right. Both of us know we are talking about the breakwater, and the anchor, and the fish that got away.