Colour tattoo of a goldfish in loose black linework with orange, yellow and red wash and ink dots, on a person's ribs.

Sketchy goldfish with watercolour wash on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A goldfish swims across the ribs, drawn in loose, sketchy black outlines with the fins and body partly open. Soft orange, yellow and red washes sit over and beside the lines, with black ink dots and a looping line trailing around the fish. The composition is off-centre and the colour is bold against the light skin tone.

Fine line Ribs Goldfish Fish Splash Watercolour

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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

Sit there, and keep your hands off the jar. You want the fish story, then you'll have it the proper way, which starts with the heat, because everything out here starts with the heat. Pour yourself the tea first. It tastes of tin, and that's how you know it's honest.

Keep reading

The fish was called Marigold, and she came out of a tinsmith's kitchen in Dunmere, given to old Abel Frane by a girl who wouldn't see the spring. He carried her across the Salt Road in a glass jar strapped to the dashboard of his truck, and every morning he changed her water as if it mattered more than his own. Then a tyre dropped into a rut outside Corrin Well and the jar flew. Water burst across the windscreen in orange splashes, and Marigold landed in the dust, gasping like a dropped coin.

Abel scooped her up with his hat. Three days later the water in the jar had gone to brown silt, and she had gone quiet, drifting on her side with her fins held open like a torn letter. On the fourth night the sky split over the flats. Rain fell for the first time in eleven years, shallow and warm, and the road turned to a mirror. Abel tipped her out at the crossroads, and she swam loops around the truck's wheels, tracing lines in the water that the stars took and kept.

Some say those lines are still there, looping across the tarmac where nothing grows. Drive the road at dusk and you'll see a flash of orange keeping pace with you in the wing mirror. Don't wave. Just mind the ruts, and let her go on ahead. She never did like being rushed.