Front and back views of a full body Japanese style tattoo with a large orange koi, cherry blossoms and grey waves across the back, arms, torso and legs.

Full body Japanese irezumi with koi and cherry blossom

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The front and back views show a full body suit of Japanese style tattooing, with a large orange koi fish filling the centre of the back and a koi and dragon-like creatures appearing on the chest and legs. Cherry blossoms in red and pink, stylised waves and dark grey wave patterns connect the sections across the body. Heavy black and grey shading forms the water and background, while the fish, flowers and small accents carry the colour, and the subject is shown against a perforated dark grey panel.

Japanese Upper arm Chest Ribs Back Thigh Calf Koi Cherry blossom Wave Dragon Bell Fish Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is only good for one face at a time. You want the one about the carp that would not turn back at the weir, yes? My grandmother told it to me on the night the rice boats came in late and the whole harbour smelled of tar and smoke. She swore it was true, and she swore it while peeling a persimmon with a knife older than the village.

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There was a red-gold carp in the river below Hanabata, so big that the fishermen said its shadow reached the far bank before noon. The cherry trees along the water dropped their petals onto its back, and it wore them the way a magistrate wears a sash. Every spring it swam upstream to the stone weir where the water fell white, and every spring the boatmen laid nets across the gap and waited. Nobody caught it. The river simply took back whatever tried to hold it.

One year a girl named Sumi came down to the weir with a bell tied to her wrist, because her brother had gone out in the autumn storms and never come home. She sat on the wet stones and rang it softly, the way you would call a dog. The carp came up under the foam, slow and deliberate, and stopped beneath her feet. It looked at her with one round gold eye. Then it turned its great head toward the sea, where her brother's boat had been lost, and it did not climb the falls. It stayed there, circling, until the morning mist lifted off the water.

My grandmother always stopped the story there and waited for someone to ask what happened next. Nobody ever asked. The fish is still in the river, she said, and the bell still rings when the wind comes off the sea. Now finish your tea before it goes cold.