Neo-traditional style tattoo of a creature with an open mouth and tongue, a fin above and scales, with pink fill and black outlines on an upper arm.

Pink-backed creature with fin and lettering on arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bold creature head with an open mouth, protruding tongue and a finned shape rising above it, with a scale pattern along the back of the design. Sketchy black linework is set against a flat pink fill behind the head, with hand-drawn lettering at the upper left that is partly hard to read. The tattoo sits on a bare arm against a bed sheet, with warm, dim lighting.

Neo-trad Upper arm Creature Tongue Fin Scale Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You carry the heel of Nan's loaf down to the old lodge pond after dark, because the thing in it has been asking since the pit closed, and nobody in Shotley Bank wants to be the one who ignored something that has outlived the men who dug the coal beneath it. Your boots slip on the wet clay. The water is black and flat as slate.

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It rises when you whistle. The fish is as long as your forearm, its back pink as a Sunday ribbon, a fin like a torn umbrella lifting clear of the surface. Its mouth opens wide enough to take the crust, and a thin grey tongue curls out to taste the air. Scales catch the lamplight like sequins on the gala banner. On the board by the step, written in backward capitals you can barely read, are the words it always wants: FISH ME, or maybe FEED ME, depending how the light falls.

Your father worked the face at Bank Pit for thirty years and never fed it once. A thing that talks from the bottom of a pond wants something back, he said, and the wanting is the danger. Tonight the fish doesn't take the bread. It noses the crust aside and spits up a brass check the size of a coin, stamped with a number you know because it was his. Forty-seven. Those checks hung on a board at the cage and were taken off again when a man came up. His is still in the water.

You stand there until your breath stops showing. Then you say the number out loud, once, the way the overman used to call the roll, and the water shivers all the way across to the far bank. The fish sinks back into the black, satisfied, and you go home to tell Nan the bread was eaten.