Sketched black and grey fish with flowing fins, surrounded by turquoise circles, a comb and a spiky sea urchin shape, tattooed along the side of the ribs.

Sketched fish and blue bubbles on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A sketchy fish with long flowing fins is drawn in black and grey linework, floating among soft turquoise circles and dark dots on short stems. A comb with a zigzag edge and a spiky, dandelion-like shape run down the lower part of the design beside faint, scratchy lines. The tattoo is set vertically along the side of the ribs, with the blue wash adding the main colour against the mostly grey ink.

Ribs Fish Bubble Circle Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas was still working a black spine out of his thumb when the fish rose under the boat, its fins spread wide as a widow's shawl. The people of Skerrow said such fish were the sea's own lanterns, and that a man who saw one must throw in something he could not spare. Tomas had nothing he could not spare, so he threw in his grandmother's comb of whalebone, the one with the zigzag teeth she had worn in her hair to church every Sunday of her life.

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The fish took it without a ripple. Down it went, and bubbles came up after it, one and then another, pale green at first and then bright as tern's eggs, each one lifting a thin stalk tipped with dark dots like seeds on a thread. Tomas rowed home and told his mother nothing. She had already given away her own mother's shawls and dishes, and she did not care to hear of more things going the same way.

Three winters later the nets came up heavy, full of spiny urchins no one wanted and no one could sell. Among them lay the comb, its teeth scrubbed clean of weed, and wound round its spine was a single strand of grey wool tied in the knot his grandmother always used. Tomas carried it up the shingle to the church and laid it on the pew where she had sat.

His mother found it there the next morning and said nothing. But she left the chapel window open after that, so the sea could come in and go out again as it pleased.