Teal and green shaded scale tattoo on the outer thigh of a person in denim shorts, lying down.

Teal scale tattoo on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A person lies on their side in light denim shorts and a woven belt, showing a tattoo on the outer thigh. The tattoo is a cluster of overlapping scale shapes arranged in a rising triangle, with soft shading in teal and green. The warm, slightly faded photo is taken from close range, with the thigh filling the centre of the frame.

Thigh Scale Fish scale Shell

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish, vinegar crisps and somebody's cheap wine, and nobody had asked Maggie Penhale to tell the story, but she stood by the trestle table with a paper plate in one hand and told it anyway.

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There was a girl called Ruth who worked the fish sheds at the bottom of Cull Lane. Every evening the boats came in and every evening she scraped the mackerel and kept the scales, because her mother said scales were money to anyone who knew how to stack them. She laid them in rows, each row sitting over the one below, until the pile rose to a point like a chapel roof. Then she sold the lot to the tinker on the quay for a single penny, and he never once asked what they were for.

One autumn the tinker came back and paid her in silver, a whole purse of it, and she went up the lane that night feeling rich. At the top of the steps the purse was warm, and when she opened it there were only scales inside, teal and green as the harbour at dusk, stacked neatly in a rising point. Her mother's bed was empty, the sea was loud below the wall, and the tinker had gone.

Maggie opened her handbag, took out a scale no bigger than a fingernail, and set it on the table between the sausage rolls and the name badges. Nobody in the hall laughed.