the.com/fish scale
Nature's chainmail, grown in rings so you can read a fish's birthday.
means The small, hard, overlapping plates that cover a fish's skin, protecting it and helping it glide through water.
from 'Scale' traces back through Old French 'escale' to a Germanic root meaning 'shell' or 'husk' — the same ancestor that gave us 'shell' and 'skull,' all sharing the sense of a hard outer covering. 'Fish' is simply Old English 'fisc,' one of the oldest words in the language, steady and unchanged in meaning for over a thousand years. Put together, the compound is plain description rather than poetry — the poetry came later, once people noticed the growth rings.
- made of
- collagen, not keratin like human nails
- growth rings
- count them like tree rings for age
- inspired
- bulletproof vest and armor research
- street slang
- also means a gram of cocaine