Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a stylised fish with a bold red outline, teal and orange striped body and dark eye, on a leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised orange and teal fish on a leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A stylised fish is shown in profile, with a large round eye, a spiky dorsal fin and a fanned tail. The body is built from bold angular bands of teal, blue, orange and yellow, separated by heavy dark and red outlines. The fish runs diagonally across the skin, with clothing and a white surface visible in the background.

Neo-trad Calf Fish Eye Fin Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, the boards are slick this time of year. You want the warm end of the stove, not that draughty bench by the door. Now, my grandfather Tobias had a boat called the Marigold, and she went out of Whitby with four men and a boy, and the boy was me father, though he wasn't much older than a cabin cat. They were after cod, but the sea had other plans.

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One grey morning a fish came alongside the hull, as long as a rowing oar and banded like a sunset someone had cut into strips. Its eye was round and red-rimmed, and it looked at my grandfather the way the vicar looks at a man who's missed three Sundays. Tobias didn't reach for the net. He reached for the tiller, because you don't haul in a thing that's watching you back.

They ran for two days with the fish keeping pace off the starboard side, fins fanned like a lady's fan in church. Men started talking. They said it was a sign, or a debt, or the ghost of some poor soul off the Sandsend rocks. Tobias said nothing at all, only fed it biscuit crumbs at dawn and watched the orange of its tail catch the light.

On the third morning the fog lifted and the Marigold's nets were full, every one of them, and the fish was gone. Tobias swore to his dying day it had gone under the keel and out to deep water to find its own people. Me father always said the old man only ever wanted a good story, and he got one, and so did we.