Small watercolour style goldfish tattoo in red and orange with pale translucent fins on the back of a hand near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small goldfish tattoo on the back of a hand

Hand · Colour · Photo

A small goldfish is tattooed on the back of a hand, shown in profile with its body in red and orange and its fins faded to pale lilac and peach. The soft gradients and blended edges give it a painterly, watercolour look against the pale skin. A cream knitted sweater cuff and a blurred blue-grey ground frame the hand.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishmonger's boy had won the goldfish at the Whitsun fair by hitting the bell three times, and by the time he carried it home up Tanner's Lane the water had slopped out of the paper cone and he was crying about it. Mrs Hobday at the corner shop said she would take it, and she put it in a jam jar on the sill, where the light came through the lace and laid pale shapes across the bottom.

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The fish grew too big for the jar, as fish do when nobody tells them not to. Mrs Hobday gave it a washing bowl, then a tin bath her husband had used for the mangle, and the whole street came to look. Some said it was a lucky fish. Some said it would die by Michaelmas. The vicar's wife said that fish were only fish, and then came back on Thursday to look again.

In the autumn the lilac in the fins faded to the colour of the inside of a shell, and the orange came up under the red like a coal left in the grate. Mrs Hobday said that was how you knew it was nearly ready to go. Her husband said that was nonsense, and he went out to the allotment and did not come back until the lamps were lit.

When the frost came, she carried the bath out to the yard and tipped the water over the wall into the river, and she stood a while watching the fish go down with the current, a small red mark getting smaller, until the river took it under the bridge. She kept the bowl. Nobody on Tanner's Lane ever kept a fish after that without first asking her what she thought.

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