Realistic black and grey tattoo of a brown trout wrapped around a fly reel, with a red and tan fly lure, on an upper arm.

Trout and fly reel on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A brown trout with spotted flanks curls around a fly reel, with its mouth gripping a red and tan fly lure at the lower right. Fine outline lines of fly line loop around the design, and the fish and reel are shaded in smooth greys with fine dotted detail. Faded lettering sits beneath the fish, and the small red accents on the lure and line are the only colour in the piece.

Realism Upper arm Fish Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruett kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps, and every August a man came down from the moors with a canvas bag and a fly reel that clicked like a clock being wound. He took the back room, paid in coins, and asked only for a bowl of cold tea at dusk so he could sit on the harbour wall and watch the water.

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The fishermen said the big trout in the pool below the lighthouse was older than the town. They said it had taken every fly ever cast there, and that it kept what it took. The man only smiled and said he had a fly the trout would not refuse. He tied it at her kitchen table with red wool unpicked from her late husband's jersey and a tan feather from a hen that had stopped laying.

On the third night the pool went still and silver. He cast once, then twice, and the line ran out over the black water with a sound like a sigh. The reel sang. The fish went deep, then went wide, then came up under the lantern with its spotted flanks catching the light. For an hour the man walked the length of the wall with the rod bent double while Mrs Pruett held the lamp and counted the oil she would have to buy in the morning.

When the fish turned on its side at last, tired, its jaw still shut on the lure, the man reached down and loosened the hook with two fingers. He held it in the shallows until it righted itself and slid away. Mrs Pruett asked him why he hadn't kept it. He wound the line in slowly, and the clicking was the only answer she got that night.