Black and grey shaded tattoo of a fish outline formed by a nail, shown on bare skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nail-formed fish symbol tattoo

Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a fish outline, known as an ichthys, with the form made from a metal nail that has a head at the upper left and a point at the lower left. The nail is rendered with grey shading, highlights and dark outlines to give it a three-dimensional look. The image is a close crop against plain skin with no colour ink.

Fish Nail Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The centurion wanted them straight, each as long as my forearm and square at the point, and he wanted the full order by the ninth hour. I had the bellows going before the lamps were out in Ashbeth. My hands knew the work well enough that my mind drifted down to the lake, where the boats came in grey and low under the weight of the night's catch, and to the smell of wet rope that always hung about the quay.

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Eli came up the hill at noon with a torn net over his shoulder. He watched me quench a nail in the trough and asked why the smoke was so black. I told him. He spat into the dust and said the iron would go into men who had done nothing but fish at night. I had no answer that did not make me a coward, so I kept hammering until my shoulder burned. When he left he paid me twice the price for a bundle of flat boat nails and did not look at me once.

That evening, with the centurion's order wrapped in sacking and waiting for the cart, I took one last length of iron from the scrap bin. I heated it until it sweated orange, then bent it slowly over the horn of the anvil, curving the body into a long belly and drawing the head and point round until they crossed. It took three tries. The result was crude, a fish made of a nail, the head sitting above the curve and the point below it like a fin.

I hung it on a peg above the door where the cart driver would not see it. In the morning Eli came back for his net, saw it swinging in the draught, and laughed for the first time that week. He took it down, turned it over in his palm, and tucked it into his tunic. "Now they will have to ask me which way I'm going," he said, and walked off down the hill towards the water.