Realistic tattoo of torn skin revealing blue-grey fish-like scales on a forearm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Torn skin revealing blue scales on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a ragged tear in skin opening onto a patch of overlapping, rounded scales in pale blue, teal and grey. The scales are shaded to look raised, with black edging along the torn edges that adds depth. The blue and teal ink dominates against the pale skin, and the design fills the centre of the arm in the photo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn to gut a fish by feel before you learn to see it, and the night porters at Hallam Wharf teach you that scales come off in the direction you want to go. Ada, who runs the ice room, says the cold keeps everything honest. At two in the morning the lamps buzz over the slabs and the river smells of diesel and mud.

Keep reading

The mackerel come in from Newlyn in crates stacked like brick walls, and the bream from somewhere past the estuary that nobody names. You work the blade along a flank and a sheet of scales lifts away in one wet piece, blue going to pewter where the light catches. Ada watches you do it once and says, "That one's not for selling." She pockets the sheet and tells you to hose the drains.

Weeks later the fish stop arriving whole. Something has been at the crates before dawn, leaving neat slits in the flesh and a single scale pressed into the ice like a coin. One night your oilskin snags on a hook and tears along the seam, and beneath the split yellow cloth something blue and overlapping catches the sodium light, shifting as you turn.

Ada doesn't look surprised. She hands you the sheet she kept, dry now and stiff as card, and says the river takes what it's owed, and that you have until the tide turns to decide whether you're the one who sells it. You fold the scales into your palm, and the ice room hums around you.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.