Thirty-five pieces of fish text art, drawn for this page in keyboard characters: eight one-liners, a shark, a whale, an octopus, a seahorse and a crab. First comes a goldfish bowl whose label you type over once pasted.
Read the full guide
Fish, sharks, soft things and shells
The subject filters sort the sea: 21 Fish, 6 Sharks, whales and rays, 4 Octopus, squid, jellyfish, 4 Crabs, shells and turtles, 5 Tanks, bowls and signs. A tank counts as fish too. Fits a comment box marks the 28 pieces within 8 lines and 30 columns. Search reads a few extra words: dead finds the skeleton.
Water is mostly spaces
A tank is a few fish and a lot of nothing, and the nothing holds the fish in place. Where a box folds spaces together, every fish ends up against the left wall: the cat ASCII art page explains why. Squash-proof keeps 11 pieces: the 8 one-liners, a fish, a jellyfish and a tank with dots for water.
Tips
Type your fish's name over the bowl's BUBBLES after pasting, 10 characters at most. Gone fishing sign holds 15.
The shortest ascii art fish, Fish swimming right, is 7 characters; Food chain on one line lengthens it with brackets.
It was read as Markdown. In CommonMark a line starting with > is a block quote, and > is the tail of every fish swimming right: 9 pieces have such a line, 5 of them one-liners. Put three backticks above and below, or use Fish swimming left.
Why did the water vanish from my shark fin?
Markdown again: a line starting with three tildes opens a code block, and in 4 pieces the water is tildes: Shark fin on one line, Shark fin circling, Fish eyeing a hook and Whale tail over the water. The same backticks save them.
Can I turn a fish to face the other way?
A one-liner, yes: write it backwards and swap each bracket and angle for its opposite, so ><((('> becomes <')))><. Swordfish, Anglerfish, Seahorse, Whale with a spout and Eel on one line already face left. A taller piece needs every line reversed and its slashes swapped.
Eel on one lineA head with one eye and a body of tildes. Add tildes for a longer eel. 1 line, 22 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Fish skeleton, one lineTail, spine, four pairs of ribs and a head whose eye is an x. 1 line, 13 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Fish swimming leftThe same fish turned round. It starts with < and not >, which matters in any box that reads Markdown. 1 line, 7 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Fish swimming rightThe keyboard fish, an emoticon older than this site: tail, three scales, an eye and a mouth in seven characters. Add brackets for a longer fish. 1 line, 7 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Fish with a bubble trailA short fish and three bubbles getting bigger as they go. 1 line, 12 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Food chain on one lineA big fish after a middling fish after a small fish, all heading right. 1 line, 21 wide. Keyboard characters only.
School of fish, one lineSix small fish in a row. The fourth one is going the other way. 1 line, 23 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Shark fin on one lineFlat water with one fin in it. Move the fin along the line to make it circle. 1 line, 23 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Show all 35 pieces (27 more)
Small, 2 to 4 lines 4
Shark fin circlingA fin two lines tall over two lines of water. 4 lines, 23 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof fishColons for scales and not one space anywhere. 3 lines, 11 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Striped fishTwo bars run through the body from top to bottom. Add a third bar and widen the body to match. 3 lines, 12 wide. Keyboard characters only.
SwordfishIt faces left, with the bill made of five = signs. Add more for a longer bill. 4 lines, 28 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Medium, 5 to 9 lines 20
AngelfishTall fins sweeping back above and below a small body. It faces right. 9 lines, 11 wide. Keyboard characters only.
AnglerfishIt faces left: a lure on a stalk, a very large mouth and a small tail. 7 lines, 23 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Big fish with scalesA fat fish covered in rows of scales, facing right. 7 lines, 26 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Crab with its claws upEyes on stalks, two claws and three legs a side. 6 lines, 15 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Fish eyeing a hookA line from the surface, a hook on the end and one fish that has seen this before. 5 lines, 22 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Goldfish bowl with a labelOne fish, two bubbles and a plate under the bowl. Type over BUBBLES with your fish's name, 10 characters at most. 8 lines, 18 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Gone fishing signA board on a post with two fish under the words. Type over GONE FISHING, 15 characters at most. 6 lines, 19 wide. Keyboard characters only.
JellyfishA bell with a face and tentacles that wave on the way down. Add rows of brackets for longer ones. 9 lines, 15 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Lobster, seen from aboveTwo claws, two feelers, a tail in three segments and a fan on the end. 9 lines, 17 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Manta raySeen from above: two horns, two eyes, wide wings and a long thin tail. 9 lines, 23 wide. Keyboard characters only.
OctopusA round head, two eyes and eight arms, counted. 8 lines, 17 wide. Keyboard characters only.
PufferfishPuffed up, spines out, mouth in an O. It faces right. 7 lines, 17 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Scallop seashellA fan of five ribs over a small hinge. 5 lines, 13 wide. Keyboard characters only.
School of fishFourteen small fish swimming right in the shape of an arrowhead. 5 lines, 20 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Sea turtleSide view, swimming right, with a shell of square plates and two flippers. 5 lines, 25 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Shark, side viewDorsal fin, four gill slits, a row of teeth and a tail as tall as the body. 7 lines, 28 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof fish tankDots stand in for the water, so the three fish stay where they were put. 6 lines, 16 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof jellyfishA bell with two eyes and two rows of tentacles, with dots where the spaces would be. 5 lines, 9 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Whale tail over the waterTwo flukes going under, which is as much of a whale as most people see. 8 lines, 17 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Whale with a spoutA whale at the surface blowing a three-way spout. Take the top two lines off and it is holding its breath. 8 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Large, 10 lines and up 3
Aquarium with a castleFive fish, three clumps of weed, a snail and a castle nobody asked for. 30 columns, so it just fits. 12 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
SeahorseIt faces left, with a tube of a snout, a row of fins down its back and a tail curled at the bottom. 11 lines, 13 wide. Keyboard characters only.
SquidA pointed mantle with two fins, two eyes and a bunch of arms, the two long ones on the outside. 11 lines, 10 wide. Keyboard characters only.
How this list was compiled: Every piece was typed for this page and checked in a monospaced font on 2026-09-19; none is copied from an archive or another site. One figure is not this site's invention: the small keyboard fish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons (read on 2026-09-20) lists ><>, <><, <*)))-{ and ><(((*> under Fish, and seven pieces here use ><>, <>< or a bracketed spelling of it, such as ><((('>. The other drawings are this site's own. The set starts with the fish people type most, the one-line kind, and works up through reef fish, a shark, a whale, rays, the soft animals (octopus, squid, jellyfish) and the ones with shells, to two tanks, a bowl and a sign. Cats looking at fish are on the cat page and every other animal is on the animal page. Each character was looked up in the Unicode Character Database, version 18.0.0: names and categories in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt, width classes in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/EastAsianWidth.txt, the Emoji property in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.txt, all read on 2026-09-19. Keyboard characters only means the 95 printable ASCII characters, U+0020 to U+007E. Squash-proof means no line starts with a space and no two spaces touch. The comment box badge means at most 8 lines and 30 columns: a rule of thumb of this site, not a promise about any app. Licence: own work