Colour tattoo of two stylised blue and purple koi fish with pink flowers and leaves across the top of a foot.

Blue and purple koi with pink flowers on a foot

Other · Colour · Photo

Two cartoon-style koi fish, one turquoise and one purple, curve around each other with pink flowers and green leaves beside them. The fish have bold black outlines, soft watercolour-like shading and light highlights, with a loose wash of teal behind them. The design fills the top of the foot, with red toenail polish visible below it on a green textured rug.

Other Koi Fish Flower Leaves Water Pink flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus has gone and the rain has thinned to drizzle, so you stand under the awning of the closed fishmonger's on Canal Street with your keys already in your hand. Someone painted the koi on the inside of the glass years ago: a turquoise fish and a violet one, nosing round each other as if they had found the same crumb at the bottom of a pond. The paint has lifted from the fins, and a pink blossom has faded to the colour of weak tea. Mrs Adeyemi used to say the fish only swam in circles when the shop was shut, and that this was why she never locked the back door.

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You remember her standing in that window every Friday with a net and a bucket, scolding the boys who tapped the glass. She kept a single carp in a tub by the till, a grumpy old thing she called Duke, and she talked to it the way other women talk to their husbands. When she retired, the shop went dark and the council painted over the sign, but nobody thought to scrub the koi. Something about them felt like the last thing she had decided on.

You walk home by the old lock, where the water is black and the lamps lie in it in long gold strokes. Halfway across the footbridge you stop and look back. From here, through the rain on your glasses, the two fish seem to turn toward each other, just a little, the way they always did when you were not looking straight at them.

You tap the rail twice, the way she used to tap the glass, and go on home.