Once upon a time there was a fish who lived under an old wooden pier. The fish was fat and stubby, and instead of scales he was covered with a thick, rubbery skin that had a number of short coarse hairs growing from it.
He also had a girl's face that had grown on the end of his tongue. It wasn't a pretty face, but it did have a certain sweetness to it, with it's plump roundness, rosy red cheeks, and the thick dark brows over serious looking eyes.
It was only a face with no mind behind it, which was fortunate, because it would be a horrible thing for anyone to have to live inside a fish's mouth. Imagine being stuck there, smelling the fish's rotten breath and having whatever ground-up chunks of food it was eating wash over your face, bits getting stuck in your nose and mouth.

When he was bored, the fish liked to swim out from under the pier and lure local fishermen into the water. He would float a short distance under the water and stick out his tongue. When someone happened to look down into the water, they would see a child's face looking up at them, and more often than not they would dive in to save the poor drowning child.

The fish would swim back under the pier, luring the would-be rescuer down to a large jumble of discarded boards, old lobster traps, and other trash that was there... where they would become trapped and quickly drown.
This provided the fish with much amusement.

However, one tragic day the fish was sitting down to a light meal of tapenade on little toast wedges and a salad of fresh spinach and strawberries (and the promise of sugar cookies afterward if he finished his regular food), when he accidentally bit down on his tongue. His teeth were small but sharp, and they ripped through the flesh of the face on his tongue, slicing through the cheeks, the plump red lips, the little round nose.
The water around him filled with blood, and he thrashed about in pain, knocking his little dinner table over and frightening several smaller fish that had been swimming by.
The fish swam far under the pier and didn't come out for nearly a month, when his tongue was on the way to being more or less healed.

Although the cuts in his tongue had closed and weren't infected, there was dreadful scarring to the face there, and from that point on when he tried to lure people into the water with it, instead of jumping in to save the child they thought they saw, they would recoil in terror from the hideous scarred face that looked up at them.

Eventually the fish was forced to admit that he would need to find some other means of amusing himself, and he took up knitting and became quite good at it.