Black and grey pencil-style drawing of a koi fish with a faceted geometric lower body, sketched on a tablet with a stylus.

Geometric koi fish design sketch

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A koi fish with shaded scales and a finned head is drawn in fine pencil-style linework on a digital tablet. Its tail section breaks into angular faceted shapes filled with hatching and stippled dots, set within thin geometric triangles and a faint circular outline. The drawing is in black and grey on a plain white background, with a hand and stylus visible at the right edge.

Geometric Dotwork Koi Fish Scale Geometric shape Sketch Facet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the band slides into the last waltz you have counted the mirror ball's facets twice and got a different number both times. The Gallery Ballroom in Hartlepool smells of spilt lager and Brylcreem, and the light it throws is broken into a thousand small triangles that slide across the floor like shoaling fish. Your partner, a girl called Irene who sells hosiery from a case on the number nine bus, steers you past the bandstand without looking at it.

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Her father kept koi in a concrete pond behind the chapel, the old kind with orange and white blotches like paint knocked over a tin, and he used to say a fish that wants to be looked at has learned to be angled. Irene says he used to say a lot of things. She tells you the pond was drained the winter he went into the infirmary, and the fish were sold to a man from Sunderland who carried them off in buckets, and nobody has heard of them since.

You dance anyway, and the room tilts into the shape of the tiles on the wall, every edge a little sharper than it should be. The fish, you think, must have gone the same way the light did, broken into planes and kept swimming in them, the head still soft and round and watchful, the tail gone to angles and cold dots of stars. Irene's hand is damp in yours. The band hits the final chord and the mirror ball stops, and for one second every facet holds a single fixed point of light.

Then the lights come up, the caretaker starts sweeping, and you find you are holding nothing but your own coat. Irene is already at the door, counting coins for the bus, and she calls back over her shoulder that the Sunderland man is dead now too, so there is no one left to ask.