Colour tattoo on a person's upper back of a woman's face with flowing red hair, with two fish and a fishing hook above her head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman's face with red hair and fish on upper back

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A woman's face rises from a band of water, with red hair spreading out around her head and two fish and a fishing hook above. The face and hair are drawn with soft shading and fine strokes, and the fish are shaded in greys and browns. Red dominates the hair, with blue eyes and touches of grey and brown across the composition.

Back Woman Face Hair Fish Water Eye

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the tar on that bucket. My grandmother's grandmother mended nets on this same slip, and she swore the thing I'm telling you happened to a girl called Morwen Pell, whose hair was the colour of rust on a wet hull. Her father was a fool who fished the drowned bay for pride, and the bay did not forgive him for it.

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One grey evening he came in with his boat riding low and nothing in the hold but a single hook, long as a finger and bent from something heavier than any cod. Morwen took it from him to clean. Wound round the shank was a lock of red hair, and when she pulled it free the water in the bucket rose up in a little column and stared at her.

She went down to the slip at low tide with the hook in her apron pocket and called the bay by its proper name. Nothing answered but the gulls. Then a face came up through the green water, pale as the inside of a shell, with eyes the blue of the deep channel and a single tear running down one cheek. It asked her, very politely, for its hair back. Two fish rose behind it, scaled in old pewter, nosing at the hook.

Morwen was no fool. She told the face the hook was her father's debt, not hers, and proposed a bargain: the bay would give back every boat it had swallowed, and in exchange she would keep the hair knotted in the wire forever, so the bay could never come looking for it. The face considered this for a long while. Then it sank, the fish went after it, and by morning every lost hull stood on the shingle, dripping. Nobody has been lost off this coast since.

So if you ever see a red-haired woman on the harbour wall with a hook in her hand, don't ask her for it. And if she's crying, leave her be. She's only keeping the bargain.