Close-up of a small fine line fish outline tattoo in black ink on the top of a foot, near the base of the toes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small fish outline on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a foot with a single small fish outline tattoo on the top, close to the base of the toes. The linework is thin and simple, with no shading, and the ink is dark grey or black. The composition is centred on the foot against a light blue cover and a pale carpeted floor.

Fine line Other Fish Outline Foot

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

You are nine years old, and the fish the older boys sell at the Ostia wharf are already going soft in the heat. Your father has told you the rule a hundred times: never scratch anything into the street, or the aediles will fine the whole family. But Mara, the net-mender's widow, has asked you for this one small thing, and she pays in dried figs.

Keep reading

She tells you exactly what to draw. One curve like a bent bow, a notch at the back for the tail, a dot for the eye. Put it low, where the wall meets the paving, where feet hurry past without looking down. Anyone who knows what it means will see it and go round to the back door of the bathhouse. You draw it three times. The first two smear under your heel. The third holds, because the morning spray has left the dust damp and the stick bites cleanly.

Four days later a man with a bad limp stops beside the wall. He doesn't look at the crowd. He looks at the ground, sets the toe of his sandal over your curve, and holds it there as if testing whether it is real. Then he lifts his eyes to you, and you realise he is the one she has been waiting for, the one who carries salt from the coast and the word that her brother is still alive.

By the next market the mark is scuffed to a ghost of itself, and you have stopped being told off for it. You could redraw it now with your eyes shut. Three strokes, a notch, a dot, and the sea smell comes up off the stones like it always did.