Japanese-style tattoo covering a torso and both arms, with a large koi fish, peonies, clouds and a moon on the chest and a colour peony sleeve on each arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese koi, peony and cloud torso and sleeves

Japanese · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A bare torso and both arms are covered in a large Japanese-style tattoo. Black and grey clouds and a pale moon sit behind a large koi fish across the chest, with outlined peonies and a bird on the stomach. Both sleeves are filled with fully coloured peonies in red, orange and pink against the dark cloud background.

Japanese Chest Upper arm Forearm Koi Peony Cloud Moon Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The koi had been fed on rice bran by the same hands for nine summers, and when the heat came that year the pond at the bottom of Mrs Okada's garden in Hastings went green as bottle glass. Her grandson Toru, who had come down from London to mend the gate, found her kneeling at the edge with a bucket and no idea what to do with it.

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She told him the old story while they scooped water. A carp that swims up the waterfall at the Dragon Gate turns into a dragon, and nobody remembers the ones that tried and failed, because they simply went quiet and sank among the reeds. Toru laughed and said the fish in her pond had never climbed anything taller than the lily pads. She didn't argue. She only pointed at the sky, where a bruise-coloured cloud was gathering over the peony bed and a pale moon hung above it in the middle of the afternoon.

That evening the rain came, not gently but in ropes, and the peonies bowed their great heads into the mud and stayed there. In the morning the pond had cleared, and in the middle of it the largest koi Toru had ever seen turned slowly under the surface, gold and white and scaled like armour, its mouth opening once toward the sky. Mrs Okada put the bucket down and said nothing. Toru understood that the fish had not climbed anywhere at all, only waited for the water to rise high enough to carry it.