Woman seen from behind with a colourful Japanese style koi and wave tattoo covering her back and left arm, against a dark red studio backdrop.

Full back Japanese koi and wave tattoo

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman stands with her back to the camera, showing a large colour tattoo of koi fish swimming among stylised waves across her back and onto her upper arm. The bold black outlines and flat shading of the scales and water are clearly visible, with reds, oranges, blues and greens. She wears black mesh trousers, and the dark red patterned studio backdrop and warm floor lighting frame the back piece.

Japanese Back Upper arm Forearm Koi Wave Fish Back piece Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring boat Marigold sat on the slip for three weeks while Tom Penhale painted her side, and the harbour master said a man who painted fish on a hull would be drowned by spring. Tom only laughed and asked me to hold the lamp steady. I was fourteen and had been sweeping his shavings for a shilling a day, so I held it.

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He painted koi climbing up a wall of blue waves, their scales outlined in black as thick as tarred rope, their fins the orange of a lifebuoy and their backs the red of the rust on the winch. Old Mrs Vosper, who mended nets on the quay steps, told him that a koi which swims up a waterfall becomes a dragon. Tom said he would rather they stayed fish, because dragons were nothing but trouble for a man with a mortgage on a boat.

In February the sea came over the wall and Marigold dragged her mooring in the night. The other boats broke their lines and piled against the granite. I stood on the top step with a torch and watched her come out of the dark, riding the swell with her bow high, and the painted koi caught the beam and seemed to flicker, every one of them swimming straight into the teeth of the tide.

We found her in the morning, tied at the far end of the harbour where no boat should have been, her paint wet with spray and bright as a new coin. Tom stood on the quay with his hand on her rail and said nothing for a long time. Then he took the lamp from me, switched it off, and put it back in its hook.