Black and grey blackwork tattoo of two ornate, scrolling fish curving down the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental fish tattoo on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an ornamental tattoo on a person's upper back, shown from behind with the head partly visible at the top of the frame. The design shows two stylised fish, one above the other, joined by a flowing S-shaped curve with scroll-like tendrils at each end. The fish bodies are filled with dense, intricate patterning and the outlines are bold and solid, against smooth, evenly lit skin.

Blackwork Back Fish Koi Ornament Filigree Swirl Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass fish came up in the net on the third morning of the blow, wound through a fathom of kelp and a length of rusted chain. I knew it before I had the weed off. My father cast the pair in his forge at Harrow Bay the winter before the rock light was wired, and he swore they were the only fish on the coast that could swim against the Skerrin Race.

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The other one went over the gallery rail the night my brother Tobias rowed out to the mainland for the doctor and never came back up the cliff path. Nobody blamed the sea for that. We blamed the wind, which was easier to shout at. I kept the surviving fish on the lamp-room sill, where the morning sun warmed its curls, and I told myself I was only dusting it.

Thirty-one years later I had the pair of them back in my palm, one scrolled tail still bent where the tide had folded it. I cleaned them with vinegar and a toothbrush from the store cupboard. The S-shaped iron they had once been bolted to had long since gone to the scrap merchant, so I fixed them to the gallery rail with copper wire, nose to nose, the way they had hung over our kitchen door when we were children.

Now, when the beam sweeps round at dusk, it throws their two shadows across the water until they meet in the middle of the Race. I stop counting the flashes for a while then. The keeper's log has no column for that, so I write it in the margin, small, where only I will read it.