Teal scale tattoo on the sole of a bare foot, with black painted toenails and a treatment couch in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal scale pattern on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

A bare foot is shown from the sole side, with a cluster of three teal scale-like shapes on the ball of the foot. Each shape is made of rows of rounded arcs with soft shading that gives a layered, textured look. The image is taken close up in an indoor studio, with the foot filling most of the frame against a purple couch.

Other Scale Fish scale Foot

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 lift in Garnet House has been dead since Tuesday, so you climb with the bucket on your hip and the fish shifting under their ice like they still mean to escape. The man at the Ropewalk stall gave you the gurnard ends for nothing because he was packing up early and didn't want to haggle with the weather. You owe him a bag of chips. You owe everyone a bag of chips, it seems.

Keep reading

By the eleventh landing the stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's onions, and the strip light buzzes like it's trying to remember a tune. Your wrists are flecked with scales that have dried silver against your skin, and under the light they go a deep sea green, the colour of the bottle your dad kept his screws in. You stop to rest the bucket on the banister. Below, the lift doors stand open on nothing, a square of dark that hums to itself.

At the fourteenth, Mrs Pryce's door is ajar and she's on the step with her transistor, wearing the cardigan with the missing buttons. 'You're late,' she says. 'Cat's been yowling since dinner.' You hand her the box. She peels back the newspaper, looks at the gurnard for a long moment, then tips a few loose scales into her palm and holds them up to the window, where the bruised evening is coming in over the car park.

'Keep those,' you say. 'They're no use to me.'

She closes her fist around them and goes inside. On the landing, one scale has stuck to the lino where it fell. You leave it there. When you reach the ground floor the lift finally starts up with a groan, and you hear it rising past you, empty, all the way to the top.