Black and gold koi fish drawn in a Japanese style with white scale outlines and red gills, beside the headline The Meaning Behind Koi Fish Tattoos, with no body part shown.

Black and gold koi fish tattoo design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A koi fish swims upward in a bold, outlined drawing, with black scales edged in white and gold-orange fins and tail. Fine hatching shades the fins and the tail, while a red patch behind the head and a yellow eye add contrast. The fish sits on the left of a plain white background, with a black serif headline to the right.

Japanese Koi Fish Scale Fin Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty years on, the first thing Pauline Reddy asked me was whether I still had the fish. We were standing by the sherry in the sports hall, under a banner that said Class of 1984 in letters somebody had cut out at a slant. I told her the fish had been dead since the spring we left, and she laughed in the wrong place, the way she always had.

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It was a koi we'd won at the school fête, black with a red smear behind the gills and gold fins going orange at the edges. We kept it in a washing-up bowl in the biology room because nobody would claim it. We named it Mr Dunmore after the chemistry teacher, who had confiscated it twice. We fed it crusts. It swam the way the fish on the art room wall swam, nose lifted, always pushing at the surface as if the water had a lid.

On the last day of the summer term Pauline carried it out in a jam jar and let it go in the canal behind the bus depot. I thought she'd been cruel. She said it had been looking up for a year and deserved to find out what was above it. At the reunion she showed me a photo on her phone: the canal, a heron, and under the scum a flash of gold she swore was ours.

I didn't tell her I'd seen it too, the bowl empty on the windowsill the morning after, one orange scale stuck to the glass like a sequin. I had kept that scale in my purse for four decades. I gave it to her across the sherry. She held it up to the light and it turned, and for a second it looked like something swimming upward.