Large Japanese style back tattoo of a grey koi, a bird and pink cherry blossom branches among swirling clouds, placed across the upper and middle back.

Japanese back piece with koi and cherry blossom

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a grey koi fish at the lower part of the design, with a bird and pink cherry blossom branches rising across the upper back. Swirling clouds and a dark textured shape fill the background around the figures. The linework is bold with soft grey shading, and the blossoms are the only areas of colour, set against the mostly black and grey ink.

Japanese Back Koi Cherry blossom Bird Cloud Branch Smoke Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The petals had been coming down on the canal since before dawn, and by the time Mrs Okada opened the lock gate they lay in drifts against the reeds like pink ash. She swept the towpath with a yard broom and grumbled at the cherry tree on the bridge, which had never once in forty years kept its blossom to itself.

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Below the bridge, a grey koi called Ashi had watched all this from the deep green water. He was the colour of wet slate, and the other fish made a point of not mentioning it. Each spring a white crane stood on the weir stones and looked down at him with one black eye, the way a clerk looks at an overdue bill. 'Climb the falls,' it seemed to say one morning, though cranes say nothing at all, and Ashi, who had never been taught manners by anybody, understood it perfectly.

He went up in the rain, tail beating the spray into smoke that curled behind him, while the blossom branch leaned out over the water to watch. At the top of the weir there was no golden gate and no dragon, only the same canal lying flat and grey, with the crane standing in it on one leg and petals floating in a ring around the place where Ashi had stopped.

He looked down at his reflection and found it was not grey at all. The rain had washed the slate off him, and the petals had settled on his back in pale pink, so that he could hardly tell where the blossom ended and he began. The crane bent its neck. Ashi decided, for once, that he would not argue with a bird.