tikzfins

Aquarium fish and aquascapes drawn with TikZ.

Version 0.3, 2026/11/04

tikzfins draws twenty-two aquarium fish in side profile, as flat vector illustrations with counter-shading, translucent fins, fin rays and the markings of the real species:

• reef: clownfish, blue tang, yellow tang, moorish idol, royal gramma, pufferfish, seahorse, lionfish, damselfish and a blacktip reef shark
• freshwater: goldfish, betta, guppy, neon tetra, swordtail, angelfish, discus, tiger barb, corydoras, bristlenose pleco, dwarf gourami and zebra danio

Their tank mates are snails (mystery, nerite, ramshorn), starfish (common, chocolate chip, blue linckia), a cleaner shrimp, a hermit crab and a moon jellyfish. Around them you can build a whole tank: an aquarium or fishbowl environment with sand, gravel, aquasoil, pebbles or crushed coral, rocks, driftwood, plants, corals, an anemone, a treasure chest, a castle and bubbles.

Like its sibling tikzeats, it does not take itself too seriously. Any fish can be eaten down to the bone, open its jaws wide to feed, flee in a cold sweat, grow legs, get caught on a hook, blow bubbles, talk, wear a hat or a snorkel, and swim in a school.

\usepackage{tikzfins}
...
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{aquarium}[width=12, height=6, substrate=soil]
  \vallisneria[at={(10.5,0.5)}, height=4.5, sway=5]
  \corydoras[at={(3,0.7)}, scale=0.4]
  \neontetra[at={(8,4)}, school=6, scale=0.35, facing=left]
  \goldfish[at={(2.5,3)}, scale=0.5, facing=left, bones=2, speed, sweat]
  \shark[at={(6.5,3.2)}, scale=0.45, facing=left, mouth=chomp]
\end{aquarium}
\end{tikzpicture}

The package needs only TikZ and works with pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. It was inspired by tikzducks, tikzlings and tikzpingus, and can be loaded alongside them and tikzeats. All figures are original drawings.

Contents

• tikzfins.sty: the package
• tikzfins-doc.tex: source of the documentation
• tikzfins-doc.pdf: the documentation
• README.md: this file

Licence

Copyright (C) 2026 Vernon Merrick Fanning

This work may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3c of this license or (at your option) any later version. The latest version of this license is in https://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt and version 1.3c or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX version 2008 or later.

This work has the LPPL maintenance status maintained'.The Current Maintainer of this work is Vernon Merrick Fanning.

This work consists of the files tikzfins.sty, tikzfins-doc.tex and README.md, and the derived file tikzfins-doc.pdf.

All drawings in this work are original. They were made from scratch with TikZ paths for this package; none is traced from or based on a photograph or on anyone else's artwork.

Author

Vernon Merrick Fanning