Four black tribal-style koi fish designs on a white background, shown as flash art with no body placement.

Four tribal koi fish designs

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

Four koi fish are drawn from above in solid black with white linework cut into the bodies, fins and tails. The patterns vary between each fish, with flowing stripes, triangular zigzags, and bands across the spine. The sheet uses only black ink on white, with bold silhouettes and no shading.

Blackwork Koi Fish Tribal pattern Flash sheet

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Calloway reached the top of Harrow Gap with a sack of salt on her back and a letter in her coat that nobody at the valley inn had asked her to carry. Snow had held off all morning. By the third cairn the wind had found the gaps in her collar, and she stopped to tie her scarf tighter, looking down at the tarn the carters called Lantern Water.

Keep reading

It lay in the bowl of the pass, black and so still that the grey sky sat on it like a lid. Four koi moved in it, lazy and sure of themselves. From up here they looked like shapes cut from wet slate, their backs striped with white, one with a spine of zigzags, one with bands across its shoulders like the rings on a rope. Old Tomas at the inn said the marks were the names of carters who had gone under the ice, one line for each, and the fish kept count so the living would not be counted twice.

Ruth sat on a flat stone and took out the letter. It was addressed to her brother, who had walked over the pass in autumn and never come back down. She had never opened it. She had only ever planned to leave it on the water, the way Tomas had told her to, so the tarn could carry it to whoever kept the lists. Her hands were stiff. She shook the salt from the sack in a pale line across the surface.

The four fish rose at once and turned, one after another, until they lay in a row facing the way she needed to go, down the valley toward home. Then they sank back into the dark. Ruth put the letter in her pocket again. By dusk the tarn had frozen white over, but four clear circles stayed open in the ice where the fish had been, and she followed them down.