Full arm sleeve tattoo of a koi carp with chrysanthemums and clouds in Japanese style, shown from three angles on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi and chrysanthemum arm sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large koi carp swims up the arm, with its head near the shoulder and its tail toward the forearm, surrounded by chrysanthemum blooms and stylised clouds or waves. The image is a three-panel view of the same sleeve from different angles. Bold outlines and layered scale shading are filled with bright reds, yellows, greens and blues on a dark grey background.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Koi Fish Chrysanthemum Flower Cloud Wave Sleeve

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Hendry brothers' fair pitched on the water meadows outside Stroud every October, and the duck pond was always my job because my hands were steady and my mother said I had the patience of a heron. The pond was a tin trough painted the blue of a swimming bath, and in it swam a carp the size of a loaf that the old man called Dorothy. Nobody could win her. You paid a shilling for a bamboo rod with a paper ring on the end and tried to loop it over her head while she turned slow circles and watched you with one gold eye.

Keep reading

Then a lad came in from the rain on the last night, dripping, with a bunch of bronze chrysanthemums he'd bought from the florist's stall by the lych gate. He didn't want a prize. He wanted to know whether the fish had ever been out of the water. I said only when Dorothy was lifted into the bucket for cleaning, and he nodded as if that settled something, then paid for three rings at once.

He didn't win. None of them ever did. But on the third ring he drew the rod back slowly, the way you'd lift a sleeping child, and the carp rose under the paper and rolled her whole gold body against the surface until the water broke over the rim and ran across my boots. Old Hendry shouted about the cloth. The lad laughed so hard he had to sit down on the step.

At closing I found the flowers left on the counter, tied with string, and a note in pencil: Tell her the river is only forty miles. I still don't know what he meant. I empty the trough every night now and fill it again before dawn, in case somebody comes upstream looking for the way home.