Colourful Japanese-style tattoo of a green dragon and an orange and blue koi fish wrapped around a black and white yin yang symbol, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and koi yin yang tattoo

Japanese · Mixed · Photo

A green dragon with orange fins and a horned head curls above a black and white yin yang symbol, while a blue and orange koi fish swims below it. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth shading on the dragon, fish and yin yang and swirling wisps of blue and purple around the edges. Colour ink dominates the design, with the black and white yin yang providing the strongest contrast.

Japanese Dragon Yin yang Swirl Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

14 March, off the Cape of Good Hope. The glass has been falling since the middle watch and Mr Pryor has the men double-reefing the topsails without being asked twice. I keep my tools lashed in the bosun's locker where the sea can't reach them, but the chisels are already wet with spray. Ada would laugh at me for writing this down, a carpenter who spends his days making things that stay put.

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Yesterday, before the weather came, a shoal of fish kept pace off the starboard quarter for nearly two hours. The cook, Tomas Varga, swore they were the same fish that had followed us out of Gravesend, bronze and white with orange at the fins, though he says that about most things. He wanted to net one for the galley. I told him the sea had lent them to us for the crossing and we had no right to keep them.

Tonight the cloud came up black over the bow, curling like smoke off a fire, and the lightning showed the swell standing in long green ridges. Varga came to my berth with a lantern and his sleeve rolled up, and showed me the ink he'd had put on his forearm in Hamburg: a black and white circle, one half full of dark water and the other of light. He asked me which half he'd be on if the ship went down. I said the half with the fish.

The wind dropped at four bells. By dawn the cloud had gone off east like a dragon bored with us, and the water lay flat and bright. Two fish were turning in the wake, one orange and gold, one a cold grey-blue, circling each other as if they had settled something. I have pinned the page to the bulkhead beside the tide tables. Varga says it is a good omen. I say it is a fish.