Coloured drawing of a koi and a yellow goldfish among yellow and red flowers, with a black-and-white stencil version of the design in the top left corner.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi and goldfish design with stencil inset

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a large grey-and-yellow koi swimming above a golden goldfish, with a red and yellow five-petalled flower beside them. A black line stencil of the same composition sits in an inset box at the top left, with an arrow marked Stencil pointing to it. The koi and goldfish are shaded with soft grey tones and flowing fins, set against a plain white background.

Japanese Koi Goldfish Fish Flower Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the lamp is nearly out and the water pumps only sing for me at this hour. You want the one about the old koi and the goldfish who swam the drowned streets? Right. Hush the children.

Keep reading

Long before the seawalls were raised, when Lambeth was still a lake with roofs in it, a koi called Harrow lived beneath a flooded supermarket car park, grey as wet slate and bigger than any rowing boat. He had a rule. He ate only what the current brought him, and he never went up to the surface where the gulls were.

A goldfish came down the drainpipe one wet spring, all yellow silk and temper, with fins like a bride's train. She called herself Marigold, which was a flower nobody had seen for forty years, and she said the lake owed her a garden. Harrow told her there were no gardens left. She told him to come up and see for himself.

So he went up. On the roof of a sunken bus a single flower had opened, red at its heart and gold at its tips, the last of its kind, rooted in a pot of sludge and rain. Harrow circled it once, twice, and understood that he had spent his whole life guarding nothing but his own fear. He did not stop being a koi, but he stopped being only one.

The old men say the flower still grows on that bus roof, and that the koi and the goldfish swim above it in the evenings, showing their silver flanks to anyone brave enough to look down. Nobody has ever caught them. Mind the lamp, love, and sleep.