Black ink fish-like shapes with small red accents arranged in a circle on the side of an ankle, in a brush-stroke style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two fish in a circle on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo on the side of an ankle, showing two black fish-like forms curving around a circle. The linework is soft and brushlike, with shading that fades into the skin. Small red accents run along the bodies of the fish, and the rest of the ink is black, set against a blurred, warm-toned background.

Ankle Fish Circle Brush stroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes ran the galley of the Marigold for eleven winters, and in all that time she never once put a fish in the pot without first asking it. She would stand at the rail with the net coming up wet and say, plainly, "You may go or you may stay," and the fish either wriggled free or lay still. Most lay still. The crew called it foolishness, but the men ate well and nobody drowned.

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One February the net came up with two fish tangled together, one black as coal tar, the other with a thin red line along its fins like a wick. Neither moved. Agnes asked her question. The black one looked at the red one, and the red one looked back, and they began to turn in the bucket, round and round, until the water itself seemed to curl like a wheel. The mate swore. Agnes said, "They are asking me to let them go together."

She tipped the bucket over the side. The fish did not swim off in a straight line. They circled the hull three times, and the gulls dropped their quarrel over the scraps and followed, and the wind that had been pushing the Marigold onto the Skerries backed round to the south and carried her home. Nobody could say whether the fish had done it or the weather had simply tired of them.

Agnes mended the net the same evening and kept the pot empty of those two for the rest of her time at sea. When the young cook asked her why, she said only that some things are owed a second look and then a wide lane of open water. The red line, she said, was for whichever one had waited longest.