Full Japanese-style sleeves on both arms and a chest piece, with pink and yellow koi, cherry blossoms and black-grey waves, shown on a shirtless torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese koi and blossom full sleeves

Japanese · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A shirtless torso shows full Japanese-style sleeves on both arms, featuring large koi fish in pink, orange and yellow among cherry blossoms. Black and grey wave patterns fill the background, with a figure of a woman's face on the upper right shoulder and chest. The bold outlines and saturated colour contrast with the shaded black and grey water, and the arms are framed against a cluttered indoor background.

Japanese Chest Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Koi Cherry blossom Wave Woman Fish Flower Sleeve Chest piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blue room at the top of Gull Lane never filled, though the card in the window promised vacancies all summer. My mother kept it for the sea. Every spring a man came up from the harbour with a wet sack, and in it was always a fish too big for the nets: a carp the colour of a hot coal, or a gold one with a split fin. She lowered each into the iron bath under the window and fed it bread crusts until the weather turned.

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The summer I was sixteen, a stranger took the room for three nights and paid in coins he rubbed on his coat first. He carried a painted scroll in an oilcloth tube, and when he unrolled it on the kitchen table, the fish were climbing a wave toward a bank of pink blossom. At the edge of the foam a woman's face rose out of the water, eyes half shut, as if the sea had only just let her go. My mother stared at it over the teapot and said nothing, which was how I knew it was trouble.

On the third night the bath was empty. The sack lay folded on the landing and the window stood open onto the wind. He came down to breakfast with wet hems and said he had only gone out to look at the water. Mother set a plate of kippers in front of him and asked, very quietly, whether the fish had gone home or whether he had carried one out under his arm. He rolled up his scroll and did not answer.

We never found the gold one. In October a letter arrived from a harbour far up the coast, with no return address, enclosing a single pink petal pressed flat in wax paper. Mother put it in the bath and filled the bath to the brim. Every spring since, a fish comes up in the sack, and every spring the bath is a little deeper than it needs to be.