Traditional style tattoo of a red and black goldfish with bold outlines and flowing fins, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black goldfish on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A goldfish with flowing, finned tail and a red and black body is tattooed on the side of the torso. The bold black outlines, scale texture and fin rays are rendered with clear, solid linework and layered shading. Red ink dominates the fins and head markings, with black and grey used for the body and shadow, against pale skin and a dark purple fabric backdrop.

Traditional Ribs Goldfish Fish Fin Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Hollin Court had been broken since March, so the boy carried the bowl up fourteen floors with both hands and his tongue between his teeth. Inside, a goldfish the colour of a dying fire turned slowly, its back dark as wet slate and its tail spread like a torn wedding veil. Mrs Okafor on the fourteenth had won it at the summer fair in 1979 and fed it every morning since, though nobody on the estate could say what she expected from it.

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The old people said a fish kept above the ninth floor had learned the language of the wind, and would grant one wish to anyone who fed it bread at midnight without speaking a word. Mrs Okafor did not believe this. She believed in the rent book, the bus timetable and the man from the council who never returned calls. Still, on the night the radiators went cold, she crumbled a heel of bread into the water and kept her mouth shut, and the fish rose and looked at her with one round eye.

"What do you want?" it asked, in a voice like a tap left running. She opened her mouth to say the lift, then the boiler, then her son's safe return from Leeds, and each time the fish shook its head. "Something small enough to carry down the stairs," it said. So she asked for the water to be warm again, and when she touched the bowl it was, and she carried it down fourteen flights herself to the canal behind the car park.

She tipped the fish into the black water under the lamp. It turned once, flashing red along its fins, and its tail opened out in the cold like a sail finding the wind. Behind her, far up the building, the lift hummed back to life and the doors sighed open on an empty landing.