Black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a koi fish on the upper arm and a dragon with flowers and waves across the shoulder and chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey koi and dragon shoulder piece

Japanese · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the shoulder, upper arm and upper chest, with a koi fish wrapping down the arm and a snarling dragon head facing forward on the chest. Flowers, curling waves and scale patterns fill the background, with heavy black shading and fine grey highlights giving the linework depth. Small yellow accents on the eyes are the only colour, and the bare skin around the piece is lit softly against a dark background.

Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Chest Koi Dragon Flower Wave Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tanker lost its fan belt forty miles past the last windmill, and Nell Okafor sat on its step with a flask of tea gone cold, watching the heat lift off the Kessel Road in sheets. Her grandfather had painted the carp on the tank door in the year the water still went to the mines. The fish swam upward on the rust-red steel, its scales picked out in grey, its tail curling into a wave that had flaked away on one side.

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A dust-coloured pickup slowed beside her, and the driver leaned out with a jerrycan in his lap. He had heard the story from his own mother, he said: a carp that climbs the falls at the head of the gorge, where the flowers grow out of the cliff, becomes a dragon. The dragon roars at the river and the river roars back. But the old women in his village always said the dragon keeps the carp's eyes, so that you can tell them apart by the gold of the stare. He poured the water into her radiator without asking for money.

She drove on through the afternoon with the window down and the belt held together by a strip of her own shirt. At dusk she stopped at the dry wash where the road dipped, unscrewed the tank cap and let the last of the water run out onto the tarmac. It spread in a long curved shape, a fish turning under a wave, and she stood and watched it go dark at the edges. The outline stayed on the road long after the water had gone, pale against the asphalt, the way her grandfather's paint still held on the door.