Traditional style colour tattoo of a red demonic fish in a black circle with orange background and HELLFISH lettering, on an upper arm, beside a cartoon character with a similar tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red demon fish with Hellfish lettering on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a circular tattoo on the upper arm showing a red, horned fish-like creature with a scorpion-style tail, set against an orange background inside a thick black border. The word HELLFISH is lettered in red around the edge of the circle. Bold black outlines and solid fills give the design a flat, classic look, and a cartoon character with a similar tattoo appears on the left of the image.

Traditional Upper arm Demon Fish Scorpion Cartoon

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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

You are the one who finds the trunk under the stairs at Gull's Rest, the boarding house on Carrick Sands, the week the herring boats stop coming in. Mrs Pellow has told you to clear it out before the August lets, and you drag it into the scullery light expecting moth and old bedding. Instead there is a tin of sea-green paint, a brush worn to a fan, and a circular board the size of a dinner plate, painted black at the rim.

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Inside the rim is a fish that is wrong in every useful way. It has a red hide, a jaw of teeth like a row of tacks, and a tail that curls up and over its back into a scorpion's sting. Someone has lettered HELLFISH around the edge in red, the letters crowded as if the painter ran out of circle. Orange fills the background behind it, the colour of a sunset seen through a bottle.

Ask Mrs Pellow who it belonged to and she will tell you the lodger from room four, a Mr Tolley who sold marine paints and claimed the sea owed him a favour. He stayed one summer, drank his tea too strong, and painted that board on the back step every evening until the tide came up over his shoes. When he left he forgot the trunk, and nobody came back for it.

You carry the board down to the water and hold it up against the grey light. The fish looks almost pleased with itself. Mrs Pellow calls from the kitchen, asking whether you have found the mop, and you tell her not yet, and you go on looking at that curled sting, wondering how a man can paint a monster that frightening and still leave it grinning.