Teal and blue fish scale tattoo on the thigh of a person wearing denim shorts, with small silver studs set among the scales.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal fish scale tattoo on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cluster of overlapping fish scales in teal, green and blue spreads across the outer thigh, with scattered smaller scale marks breaking away from the main patch. The shading moves from darker blue edges to lighter green highlights, giving the scales a rounded, dimensional look. Small silver studs sit on the skin among the scales, and the image is in colour with a plain background of wood flooring and denim.

Thigh Fish scale Scale Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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I'm writing this on the back of a petrol receipt because the motel has no paper. The road out past Cutter's Flat runs dead straight for forty miles, and at about the thirtieth mile the heat starts doing things to the tarmac. You see water lying across it, teal and deep, and then it slides off ahead of you like a sheet pulled off a bed. Yesterday I stopped the car, sure I'd hit a flood, and got out to find only dry salt crust under my boots.

But the crust isn't smooth. It's broken into plates, each one curled at the edges and overlapping the next, a whole floor of them rounded like the backs of fish. Ray at the petrol station says the lake was full when his grandfather was a boy, and the bream came up the creek by the thousand. When the water went, they stayed in the mud and the sun baked them into the ground. He says on hot afternoons you can still catch a green glint off the flats, which is just light doing what it likes.

I kept thinking of your aquarium in the garage, the one that drained the year Mum went into hospital. You always said the dead fish were the best part, that they kept their shapes. Well, here they do. I photographed a patch of them and the scales came out greener than anything I've seen in real life, which is probably the point of mirages.

I'm driving on in the morning. If you get this before I reach the coast, put the kettle on. I'll bring the scales back in a jar, or at least a story about them.

Love, Jo