A hardy goldfish - thought to be one of the oldest in the UK at 22 - has miraculously survived a health scare and an encounter with a sausage roll to continue to thrive in a family home.
Nicol Arathoon says Sparky is "part of the furniture" and she'd be "lost without" the pet. She bought him in a plastic bag at her local garden centre in 2001 along with another goldfish, which died the very next day.
But even when Sparky fell ill in April, he battled to survive and "amaze" 38-year-old Nicol, whose even had a picture of the fish tattooed on her arm.
Speaking to Liverpool Echo, the mother of two also recalled the time when Sparky leapt out of the water, and survived when Nicol's niece threw a sausage roll in his tank.
Nicol, who is a beautician, said: "He's part of the furniture. I'd be lost without him. I was not giving up on him. Everyone was saying flush him down the toilet, put him out of his misery, but I wasn't having it."
The mother was concerned when Sparky wouldn't eat eight weeks ago, and curled up into a ball in the water.
"I was using a straw to push the peas into his mouth, and I was nursing him basically," Nicol, from Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, said.
"In the end, before I went on holiday I said to my partner if he's still sick when we come back, I'm taking him to a fish vet.
"We put the last bit (of medicine) in the tank just before we went away, and when we came back a week later at half four in the morning we were like - oh my God, he's swimming! We didn't even think he was going to be alive, but somehow he survived it.
"It's a miracle. I'm really in shock. I'm amazed. I've been crying over him and everything."
Following the encounter with the sausage roll in 2017, Sparky lay stricken floating upside down in his tank.
He had a lucky escape then too.
Nicol said: "My niece threw a sausage roll in the tank.
"We had a really bad scare, I was crying my eyes out because he looked like he was dead and he was belly-up at the top of the tank. We just changed his water, and he came back to life.
"He jumped out once; we were changing his water and he leapt out of the jug. He landed on the kitchen floor. That was when we first got him and he was quite young then, but God knows how old he was when we bought him.
"I've always said when he does pass I want him taken to a vet to see how old he really is, because there's every chance he's older. He's definitely the oldest fish from around here."
Goldfish typically live between 10 and 15 years. The oldest goldfish ever on record was a 43-year-old creature named Tish, won at a fairground in 1956.
