Full body Japanese style tattoo with koi, dragon and lotus motifs across the arms, chest and legs of a seated person against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese bodysuit with koi and dragon

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A seated person wears a full body tattoo covering the arms, chest, torso and legs, with koi carp, a dragon and pink lotus flowers set among grey wave and scale patterns. The shading is smooth and layered in grey, with bold colour on the koi in orange, red and yellow and on the lotus blooms. The figure is photographed against a plain black backdrop, with the head cropped out of frame.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Chest Back Thigh Calf Koi Dragon Lotus Wave Peony Scale Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The koi had grown fat on windfall Bramleys all August, and Dad swore the pond at Lower Hadley had never held anything so stubborn. The big orange one, Sunday we called him, would take bread from my fingers but would not come near the vicar, who tried twice one afternoon and went home with a wet cuff and a bruised opinion of Methodists.

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The pond sat below the old orchard wall, and on the stones there was a crack in the moss that Grandad Tomas said looked like a dragon with its head lifted toward the water. He told us the carp were its gate-keepers and that the pink lotus only opened for people who did not stare at it. We stared at it anyway. Nobody in our family ever learned to be polite to a fish.

That year the drought came in July and the water dropped a hand's width every week. By the third week of August Sunday was stuck in a shallow channel between the Cox trees, his back fins out in the air, his gills working slowly. My brother Ben and I dragged a sheet of corrugated tin down the bank and eased him onto it with a bucket of pond water, and he lay there looking up at us with one gold eye, perfectly unimpressed.

We carried him to the deep end under the wall. When he slid off the tin the water took him without a ripple, down past the lily leaves toward the dark where the dragon's crack went into the stone. Ben said he'd gone home. I said he'd gone to the gate. Next morning a single lotus had opened in the middle of the pond, and one loose petal was turning slowly on the surface, round and red as a coin.