Full body Japanese-style tattoo with green and orange dragons, koi and goldfish over black wave-patterned ground across the chest, arms and thighs.

Full body Japanese irezumi with dragons and koi

Japanese · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A standing man, shown from the front with his head cropped out of frame, is covered with a full body tattoo across his chest, abdomen, both arms and thighs. Black diagonal wave-like shading forms the ground behind the figures, with dragons in green, orange and yellow, plus goldfish and koi in red, orange and green. The subject sits against a plain black backdrop, with the figure centred and the fists held at the sides.

Japanese Chest Upper arm Forearm Thigh Dragon Koi Goldfish Wave Leaves Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river had been frozen for three days when Tomeko finally broke the ice with the heel of a rice pot and found the carp still turning slow circles beneath the surface. She did not believe it until she knelt, her knees soaking through her cotton trousers, and watched an orange flank flash once, then settle.

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Her father had called these fish the river's bookkeepers. Every wave that rolled downstream, every leaf caught in the reeds, went into their accounts, and at the spring thaw they would settle what was owed. He said it the way he said most things, half joking, with his pipe clamped in his teeth, and she had stopped listening years ago. Now she thought of the green dragon he had painted on the lid of the rice chest, its tail curled through the wave pattern like smoke through a shutter.

The carp rose toward her, neither hurried nor afraid. Behind it, under the grey skin of the water, something longer moved, its scales catching the light the colour of old copper. Tomeko understood then that the debt had never been her father's. She reached into her sleeve, took out the last coin from the bowl on the shelf, and pressed it into the hole she had made, watching the current carry it under the ice toward the bridge and the sea beyond.