Small teal and black outlined tattoo with a curved tail-like fin, placed behind a person's ear, with ear piercings visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small teal shape behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Colour · Photo

A tiny tattoo sits behind the ear on the side of the neck, showing a rounded teal shape with a black outline and a curved fin or tail at the left. The linework is simple and clean, with flat teal fill and no shading. The pale skin and dark hair frame the small, centred design.

Fine line Neck Sea creature

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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

The water tank on the roof of Hollins Tower had been dry since the council cut the pipes, so when the rain came that October, the first thing anyone noticed was that it was full. Mrs Adaeze Bell climbed the forty-one stairs with a bucket because the lift was broken again, and she found a fish in there no longer than her thumb. It was the teal of a swimming pool tile, round in the belly, with a tail that curled up at the end like a question.

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She carried it down in a yoghurt pot. On the fourth floor the lights went out, and a boy called Ilyas started crying, and the fish turned in the pot and lit the stairwell the colour of the sea. Nobody asked where it had come from. The old men on the bench said a fish like that had lived in the river before they filled it in, and that it would go back if someone was kind enough to open a door.

So they opened the window at the bottom of the stairwell, the one that looked over the car park toward the canal. Mrs Bell tipped the pot. The fish did not jump. It hung in the air a moment with its tail flicking, then went down through the drizzle like a coin into a well, and where it touched the tarmac a small wet shape shone for a second before the rain covered it.

Years later, a girl from the fourth floor grew up and moved to a city by the sea. On her first morning in the new flat she found a single scale stuck to the bathroom tiles, and she laughed and wrote to Mrs Bell to tell her. The reply came back on lined paper: Keep the window open, love. It always finds its way home.