Colour Japanese style tattoo of a koi fish leaping through black and grey waves with pink cherry blossoms, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Koi and cherry blossoms on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large koi fish rises diagonally up the arm, its scales shaded in orange, brown and grey with a pale highlighted head and open mouth. White and grey linework waves curl around it against a dark shaded background, and red and pink cherry blossoms sit among the waves. The composition wraps from the shoulder down the upper arm, with the fish body following the curve of the limb.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Koi Fish Wave Cherry blossom Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Pike had kept the fish in a tin bath behind the joiner's shop for three summers, and by the spring of 1956 it had outgrown the bath, the yard and very nearly his patience. Its back was the colour of a wet penny, with gold running through the grey wherever the light caught it. Mrs Ashworth from the chapel called it a dirty great goldfish. Harold called it Tomiko, after a girl he had seen once in a Pathé newsreel, standing in a garden of plum trees while a band played somewhere out of shot.

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The canal ran at the bottom of Mill Lane, black and slow, and every Saturday the boys fished it for nothing and threw back whatever they caught. On the first warm Saturday in May, Harold wheeled the bath down on a handcart, Tomiko sloshing and offended, and tipped her in at the lock gates. She did not swim off. She turned once, slow as a verger, and looked up at him with one round eye.

Then the spray off the weir caught the sun, and she went at the water, up the lip of the lock where the foam stood in white curls like the ones in the print above the joiner's bench. She hung there with her mouth open, the whole length of her bent against the sky, while blossom from the plum tree on the towpath came drifting down around her, pink and ridiculous. Harold stood holding the empty handcart with his cap in his other hand.

He walked home without the cart. By Sunday the chapel had decided it was a miracle, and Harold let them believe it, because it was easier than explaining that he had finally let something go and found he did not want it back.