Colour Japanese style tattoo on an upper arm showing an orange creature with whiskers, pink swirling clouds, a green element and a pink peony-like flower.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese style colour tattoo on an upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an orange creature with pink whisker-like lines and a green shape beside it, with a pink flower near the bottom and yellow scale-like patterns at the lower edge. Swirling grey and pink clouds fill the background areas around the main motifs. Bold black outlines define the forms, with soft colour fills in orange, pink, green and yellow, and the skin looks shiny, possibly from healing ointment.

Japanese Upper arm Creature Peony Cloud Scale Leaf Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carp came up beneath the lamp room the week the foghorn cracked, its orange back lit each time the great lens swung round. My father swore it was a koi that had slipped some laird's pond on the mainland, but I had seen the whiskers, two pink threads trailing from its jaw like ribbons on a May Day frock, and no pond fish I knew had ever complained about the light.

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My mother grew peonies in biscuit tins along the gallery rail, pink ones the salt wind shredded by noon. At dusk the creature nosed those tins until the petals drifted down into the foam, and mist rolled in grey and curling off the Skerry as if the sea were breathing out. Father said it was eating the blooms out of spite. Mother said it was eating them because nobody had ever given it anything that was not a hook.

So I took it a bucket of herring from the store, where the oilskins hung yellow with age and smelt of tar. Its flank was scaled like those oilskins, every plate edged in black, and it looked at me with an eye that had seen a great many boats go out and not come back. It said the lamp burned too bright for the fish that came to the rocks to spawn, and that a light which never dimmed was only a way of looking at the dark without admitting it was there. Then it sank, and the mist came thicker.

For three nights no boat put out from Ardnahoe. On the fourth morning I found a single pink petal stuck to the brass rail, wet and cool, and far below the orange shape turned slowly in the shallows, circling the rocks where the fishing lines used to snag. That night I turned the wick down one notch and the boats came home.