A full colour Japanese style sleeve tattoo of a red koi fish, cherry blossoms and waves on a woman's upper arm and forearm.

Koi and cherry blossom sleeve on an arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A seated woman, cropped below the eyes, rests a tattooed arm on her lap while wearing a sequinned white top and a pale skirt against a wooden wall. The sleeve shows a large red koi fish swimming among blue waves, with pink cherry blossoms and other flowers, drawn with bold outlines and soft shading. The palette is vivid, with reds, pinks, blues and greens dominating across the arm.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Koi Fish Cherry blossom Wave Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been broken since March, so you climb fourteen floors with the bucket held against your hip, water slopping over the rim and dark spots appearing on the stairwell lino behind you. Mrs Okonedo on eleven has stopped asking what you're carrying. The koi inside is no bigger than your thumb, orange and white, and it has already outgrown the bucket twice.

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The pond is a paddling pool your brother left behind when he moved to Leeds. Every morning you fill it from the kitchen tap, add a pinch of salt from the chip shop sachets, and watch the petals that drift in off the car park settle on the surface. There are no cherry trees on the estate. The nearest is in the churchyard across the ring road, and you have only ever seen it in February, when the branches look like they've been dipped in milk. The pink paper petals you cut from a pack bought at the market fool the fish every time. It noses at them, turns away, and comes back.

The letter from the council arrives on a Tuesday, saying every balcony must be cleared by the end of the month. You read it twice, standing in the doorway with the bucket going cold in your hand. Then you carry the fish down all fourteen floors again, past the lift that still says OUT OF ORDER in fading biro, and out past the bins to the canal behind the ring road. The water there is green and slow and smells of diesel.

You tip the bucket at the edge, very gently. The koi hangs for a moment in the brown water, flicks once, and slips under the reeds. A single pink petal turns on the surface, drifts after it, and goes the same way.