Black and grey drawing of a fish with a sailing ship and waves in its body and a skeletal tail, a neo-traditional style tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship-filled fish with skeleton tail design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a tattoo design showing a fish whose body contains a sailing ship on rough waves and clouds, with its tail end drawn as a fish skeleton. The fish has fine hatching and stippled dot shading along its scales and fins, with bold outlines and stark contrast between the ink and the white paper. The design is drawn on a flat sheet with a fine liner pen and a bone to the upper left, with the composition set diagonally across the frame.

Neo-trad Dotwork Fish Ship Skeleton Wave Cloud Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Harrow Quay believed Tam Gilroy when he said the trout had swallowed the Margaret Ann whole. He was sober, which made it worse. He stood at the rail of the Leith ferry at midnight with the lamps of the town going out one by one behind him, and he kept pointing at the black water as if the thing might surface to prove him right.

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The fish had been feeding in the deep channel since the spring gales, he said, and it was longer than any smack on the coast. Its belly was full of sail. Tam claimed he had seen the topsails through its gills, furled tight, the crew still aboard, lanterns swinging in the ribs like the windows of a dark town. Nobody believed the lanterns either.

Then the nets came up in September with a single bone in them, a tail as wide as a barn door, and every man on the quay went quiet. Tam took it home. He hung it above the bar of the Anchor, where the streetlight slants through the white ribs at closing time and throws their shadows across the wet boards like rigging on a ship that never sank.

The landlady swears that on the stillest nights, after the last drinker has gone, she hears a bell tolling somewhere beneath the floor, slow and patient, the way a sea would ring if it had a belly to hold it.