Purple goldfish with flowing violet, pink and teal fins, shown as a colour tattoo on the forearm beside its original painted design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple goldfish tattoo on an arm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The left side shows a painted design of a purple goldfish with long, flowing fins shaded from violet to pink and teal on textured paper. The right side is a photograph of the same fish tattooed on skin, with smooth solid fills and soft gradient shading that follow the painting closely. The composition places the fish diagonally across the frame, with the tattoo's fins trailing down the arm.

Forearm Goldfish Fish Fin Koi

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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 leat ran along the bottom of Askew's orchard, and in the last weeks of August it went so low that the old men could count the stones in it. Among the stones lived a goldfish the colour of ripe damsons, which nobody remembered putting there. Its fins trailed behind it like weed in a current, though there was no current left to speak of.

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Tom Askew fed it windfalls from the Bramley row, tossing them in and watching the fish rise and take them. It never ate the whole apple. It left a neat half-moon bitten from each one, and Tom took that as manners. When the wells in the lower field ran dry, he carried water up from the cattle trough in two pails, and the fish seemed to thank him by hanging still in the shallows while he worked.

By the first week of September the leat was nothing but cracked mud. His sister Nell said a fish could not live in a bucket, and Tom said it could not live in mud either, so they could argue about it on the way. He carried it down to the deep pool under the old perry pear with its tail sliding over his forearm, and the fins lifted and spread in the water like smoke. At the pool the fish turned once, slowly, and the late sun came through the leaves and turned the water briefly pink.

In October the pear dropped its fruit and the leat filled again with rain. The fish went back to the Bramley row, and Tom knew it had gone because the windfalls he threw in came back bitten, every one of them, in the same neat half-moon.