Two patches of teal and purple fish scale tattoos with shaded highlights on the outer thigh.

Teal and purple fish scale tattoos on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two separate clusters of overlapping fish scales sit on the outer thigh, one higher and one lower and angled diagonally. Each scale has a purple outline, a teal and green body and a soft highlight, with thin light lines marking the edges. The colour is bright and saturated against the plain skin, and the photo is taken straight on with the thigh filling most of the frame.

Thigh Fish scale Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrowgate House has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs, fourteen floors with a carrier bag of shopping knocking against your knee. Somebody has left a trail on the concrete landings, a glitter of blue-green flakes that catch the strip light and then go dull. By the sixth floor you have stopped pretending they are sequins off a Christmas jumper. They are too stiff and too neatly overlapped, each one edged in a purple line as if it was drawn with a ruler.

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Mrs Okafor on eleven says the Dwyer boy has been keeping something in the bath again. She says it the way she says everything about that flat, with a sniff and a look at the ceiling, but she hands you a slice of lemon cake for the climb anyway. The trail ends on fourteen, at a door with a tea towel stuffed underneath to hold back a smell of salt and river mud. Inside, the bath is full to the brim and the water is the colour of a kingfisher's back. Something moves below the surface, unhurried, and a row of shingles lifts and settles like the pages of a closed book.

Dwyer sits on the edge of the tub with his trainers soaking. He found it on the bins behind the chip shop, he says, a fish with a tail like a folded fan and eyes that look at you sideways. He wants to know whether it will fit through the window and whether the sea is very far from Sheffield. You tell him the sea is a bus and a train away, and that it has never once waited for anyone.

You help him tip the tub's rim with a dish towel under your hands. The two of you watch the water spill down the outside wall in a rush, and the scales ripple out into the grey evening, one overlapping the next, until the whole block seems to shimmer from the bottom up.