A man with full-body Japanese style tattoos in green, red and cream, showing a koi fish and peony flowers on the torso and arms, with his hands clasped in front of white underwear.

Japanese koi and peony tattoos on torso and arms

Japanese · Chest · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a man's torso, arms and upper thighs covered in traditional Japanese style tattoos. A large red and cream koi fish sits on the chest and ribs, with peony flowers, waves and cloud motifs filling the surrounding areas and continuing down the arms and legs. The shading uses solid green and dark tones with fine detailed outlines, set against a plain black background with his hands clasped in front of white underwear.

Japanese Chest Upper arm Forearm Thigh Koi Peony Flower Wave Cloud Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour at Oyashima had forty boats, and every one of them carried a carp painted on its bow. The old men said a carp that fights up the rapids becomes a dragon, and nobody in the village wanted a dragon swimming through their nets. So the carp were painted red and gold and cream, and the fishermen kissed the wood before they rowed out.

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The autumn the sea rose grey and hard, Hatsune's father did not come back with the others. Her mother said the sea takes what it likes and keeps what it takes. Hatsune did not believe her. She mended the last skiff in the shed, painted a fresh carp on its prow with her father's brushes, and rowed out alone past the breakwater while the women on the wall shouted at her to come home.

She found the fish on the black rocks where the waves broke white. It was as long as her arm and the colour of a paper lantern, with scales like old coins and foam caught in its fins like petals. It did not ask why she had come. She gave it the rice ball wrapped in her sleeve, and it ate slowly and watched her with one eye that looked very old. The sea keeps its own accounts, it said, and what is owed will come back in the tide, one wave at a time.

At dawn the Sazanami nosed into the harbour with no one at her tiller. Her hold was heavy with silver fish, and her sail was dry, as if the wind had only sighed on her. Tangled in the weed at her bow was her father's oar, and on the carp's flank someone had added a single new scale, bright as a coin. Hatsune still repaints it every spring, one small red stroke, so the fish will know she remembers the debt.