Close photograph of a thigh tattoo of overlapping blue and green fish scales, shaded from teal to green, on a person lying on a white bed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal fish scale pattern on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A thigh is covered by rows of overlapping fish scale shapes, each outlined in dark ink. The scales are shaded with gradients from deeper teal to lighter green and blue, giving them a dimensional look. The tattoo runs down the upper leg against a pale bedsheet, with dark clothing visible at the top edge of the frame.

Thigh Fish scale Scale Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent of Mardoll's Travelling Marvels leaked over the sawdust ring, so the rain came in to watch the show. That was the trouble with the company that autumn. The bears had gone to a zoo in Leeds, the strongman to a cousin in Hull, and only Ada Vell was left, a fire-breather with no fire. She kept a bucket of painted tin scales in the wagon, teal and green, because her mother had told her a mermaid could always find her way home by the sound of water.

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Ada had no mermaid. She had the scales, which she had been polishing since the summer the big top sold. Each night she stood in the ring under one lamp and told the empty benches about a girl who swam up the Tyne to ask the moon for a better act. The moon, being a fair moon, said the show would close when the last scale fell off.

On the Friday a boy came in from the wet with a torn ticket and asked whether the mermaid was real. Ada said no. Then she said, in the plain way her grandmother used to tell things, that a scale is only a fish's way of keeping its shape against the cold, and a crowd is only a town's way of keeping warm.

She bolted the tent that night and drove the wagon out to the marsh. Each tin scale overlapped the one below it, and she laid them down in the reeds one row at a time until the moon came out and found nothing left to ask for.