Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised fish line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A single fish in side profile, drawn with bold black outlines and a few interior lines marking the fins, gill and body. The linework is smooth and uniform with no shading, and the fish fills most of the width of the frame. The image is entirely black and white, with a brown tool or hand partly visible at the right edge.

Fish Line drawing

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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 departures board has been stuck on Carlisle for twenty minutes, so you take a pen from the buffet till and start drawing on the back of a timetable. The first line is the spine of the thing, long and unbroken, curving from the nose down to the tail the way the river curved under the old bridge at home. You don't lift the nib. Your father always said a fish drawn in one go would swim, and you were seven and believed him.

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The fins come next, three quick strokes, then the gill, a single curve like a hook someone has bent gently back. The eye you leave for last. You have never once got the eye right, so this time you leave it as a small dark dot, which is closer to what he would have called honest. Outside, a goods train rolls through without stopping, the window hums, and a man in a hi-vis jacket glances at your drawing over your shoulder and says nothing, which you take as approval.

The board clicks. Platform four, the Glasgow stopping service, which means the fish will have to ride in your coat pocket. You fold the timetable along its crease so the drawing sits on the inside, where the rain can't reach it, and you think of the Tweed in March, of him standing knee-deep in it, not catching anything, perfectly content to be there.