Colour traditional-style tattoo of a stylised fish with red and orange flame-like fins and scale shading, on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised fish with red flame fins on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold stylised fish with a dark body, orange and pink stripes and a scale pattern at its rear, with a red and orange flame-like fin rising from its head. Heavy black outlines define the shapes, and the scales are shaded in black and grey. Red and orange ink dominate the colour, and the design wraps diagonally across the upper arm and shoulder.

Traditional Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Fish Flame Scale Fin

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

The lamp had failed twice that week, and by the third night Tom Pascoe had stopped blaming the gulls. He found the scales first, bright as spilt pennies, caught on the iron rail of the gallery, and then a wet trail of something long and heavy dragging itself up the stairs from the rocks.

Keep reading

Pascoe had kept the light at Carrick Dhu for nineteen years and knew the sea's habits the way a man knows a bad tooth. Fish did not climb. Yet the thing waiting on the gallery was a fish, dark-backed and banded with rust, its scales stacked like the slates on a chapel roof. From its head rose a crest of fins that burned red and orange in the beam, flickering as though the lens had caught a fire and kept it.

He did not reach for the flare gun. He sat on the top step with his tin of tea and watched it breathe. 'You're after the oil, or the glass,' he said. The fish turned its gold eye towards the lamp, the flames along its fin rose, and the great lens began to turn of its own accord, slow as a tide. The beam swept out over the Atlantic, and three miles off a fishing boat that had been lost since Tuesday put its bow about and came home.

In the morning the gulls were back and the lamp burned steady. Pascoe left a dish of pilchards on the gallery rail each night after that. Most nights it was empty by dawn, and once there was a single scale on the rail, warm as a coin, which he kept in his waistcoat pocket until the day he retired.