Black and grey skeletal anglerfish tattoo with a small skull above it on an upper arm, photographed on a bed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal anglerfish on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A skeletal anglerfish with a large round eye, open jaw of sharp teeth and a dangling lure is tattooed on the skin. The bones and fin rays are outlined and shaded in grey and black, with tonal highlights on the skull and ribcage. A small skull sits to the upper right of the fish, and the design is set against pale skin and white bedding.

Upper arm Fish Skull Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways off the harbour since six, and by eleven the tarpaulins over Gull Street market were sagging like wet sails. You were still gutting the last of the hake when Dorrie Aske slapped a crate onto the slab and said the Margaret had brought up something she did not want to name. Under a sheet of melting ice lay a deep-water anglerfish, black as a boot, its jaw hinged wide enough to swallow your fist.

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Nobody on the neighbouring stalls would touch it at first. Its skin had gone thin and its ribs showed through like the spars of a boat left out in weather, the fin rays fanned and brittle as old lace. Dorrie reckoned it had been dead a week at least, down in the cold where nothing rots quick. The lure hung from its head on a stalk of bone, a grey bulb with no light left in it. You tapped it with the back of your knife, and the bulb cracked open. A tiny skull rolled out onto the wet wood, no bigger than a sloe, and nobody could say how it had got in there.

You kept it. You wrapped the skull in a square of yesterday's newspaper, tucked it into your apron pocket, and walked home along the quay with the rain running down your collar. Outside the chandler's the lamp flickered on, and for a moment the paper seemed to glow, as if something in your pocket still remembered how to shine.

Next morning Dorrie asked where the little skull had gone. You told her it had gone back down to where things keep their own light, and you did not mention that the pocket of your apron was still warm.