Colour tattoo of a lionfish in purple and red-brown stripes across the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lionfish tattoo on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large lionfish is tattooed on the outer thigh, shown in profile with its long spiny fins fanning out across the skin. The fish is rendered in purple and red-brown bands, with lighter purple shading along the body and fins. The design fills most of the frame against a plain skin background with clothing visible at the top edge.

Thigh Fish Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Holloway had kept the light on Scarrow Skerry for thirty-one years, and in all that time nothing had come to the rocks that did not belong there. So when the spiny thing lay in the pool below the gallery steps, she took it for driftwood, a fan of bark or a broken cuttlebox. Then the sun through the glass caught its bands, plum and rust, stripe after stripe like a pennant somebody had sewn from a sunset.

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She crouched, knees complaining. The fish did not move. Its long rays stood out from its sides like the ribs of an umbrella left open in a gale, each one barred and tipped with a pale frill. She had read about them in the harbour bulletin: the ones that had come up from warmer seas in the bilges of ships and now crowded the reef, eating the small fish the others needed. Nobody had said they could look like this.

Her grandson Tom had rung from Plymouth the night before to ask whether she still had the old dip net. She had told him nobody needed a net for something so slow. Now she fetched it from the store under the lamp room, and her hands were steady, which surprised her. She slid the mesh under the fish and lifted, and it flared and shook, every fin spread, filling the net like a lit chandelier.

She carried it up forty-two steps and tipped it into a bucket by the window. By dusk the sea lay flat as tin, and the beam swept out over it while she stood at the rail. When she finally emptied the bucket over the rocks, the lionfish went down in one bright blur of purple, and she did not watch where it landed.