Realistic red and black fish tattoos with flowing fins on the side of a torso, above denim jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black fish on a side torso

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A red fish and a black fish swim towards each other on the side of a torso, with long, flowing fins drawn in soft, layered shading. The red fish sits higher and the black fish lower, which gives a sense of movement across the skin. The image is a close, partial view of a light-skinned body in a white top and jeans, with a plain background.

Realism Ribs Fish Goldfish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The red carp had been circling the lighthouse pool since the tide turned, and every evening the fisherwomen of Skerrow Isle watched it rise to the surface and sink again, as though it were waiting for a boat that never came.

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Old Maren Tulloch said it was waiting for the black fish. Her mother had said the same. The black fish lived in the deep trench beyond the skerries, where the water went the colour of ink, and it came up only once in a generation, when the wind had blown from the north long enough to thin the mist. Nobody had seen it in Maren's lifetime, but she had heard something knock against the hull of her father's boat one night when she was small, a sound like a hand tapping a door from underneath.

The summer the sea wall cracked, the red fish stopped circling and began to swim straight down. Maren followed it along the rocks with a bucket and a torch, and found it hanging over the gap where the stone had split. Below, slowly, something dark was rising. It was not frightening. It moved the way smoke moves when there is no wind, its long fins trailing like cloth in water, and when it came level with the red fish the two of them turned together, one above and one below, and the gap in the wall seemed to close around their meeting.

Morning came grey and calm. The wall stood whole, and the pool was empty of colour except for a single red scale caught on the lip of the bucket. Maren keeps it in a tin on her windowsill. She says the black fish went home, and the red one went with it, and that the island has been mending itself ever since, one stone at a time.