Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a large fish with a solid dark tail fin running down the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketched fish tattoo along the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large fish is drawn in loose, sketchy linework running vertically down the side of a bare torso. The tail fin at the top is filled with solid black ink, while the body uses hatched shading and scattered ink dots. The image is monochrome, with a dark background and a hand visible at the upper left.

Ribs Fish Ink splatter Dot

Find an artist for this

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

By the third week of October the big top smells of wet canvas rather than sawdust, and you are the last one awake when the generator coughs itself quiet. Mr Aldous left you the ledger, the keys to the wagon with the broken step, and the fish. It lives in a glass tank at the back of the menagerie tent, a grey thing as long as your forearm that the ring-master insists is a sturgeon and the children call the Widow. Nobody has paid to see it since August.

Keep reading

Tonight you carry the tank's water out in a galvanised pail because the pump has died, and the fish, which has never once looked at you, turns in the murk and holds still. Behind you the painted banner sags on its poles. It shows a fish leaping from a black sea, ink spray flung off its flanks, and the paint has cracked so that only the tail fin is still whole.

The towpath runs past the gasworks to the cut, where the water is black and smells of coal. You tip the pail slowly, the way you would pour a drink for someone who has already left the room. The fish does not leap. It slides out in one long pale rope and settles on the stones, gills working, and for a moment the only sound is the drip from your sleeve.

Then it finds the edge and goes, a flick of silver that throws a scatter of droplets across the reeds, a dozen small dark dots on the stone where the light catches them. In the morning the wagon will be sold for scrap and the banner rolled up with the others. You keep one dot of ink on your thumb all day, as if the show had decided, after all, to leave something behind.