Back of a shirtless man with arms outstretched, showing a black and grey Japanese style koi and lotus back tattoo with arm tattoos on the upper arms.

Koi and lotus back piece

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large koi fish swims up the centre of the back, surrounded by wave lines and cloud shapes, with a lotus flower at the base of the spine. The linework is bold and the shading is in soft grey washes, with more detail on the fish scales and fins. The man faces away from the camera against a plain grey backdrop, so the back piece fills most of the frame.

Japanese Back Upper arm Koi Fish Lotus Wave Cloud Man Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's older than my grandmother and twice as cracked. There, where the wall gave up and the ivy took over. You see that pond, skinned over with green? Forty carp lived in that moat when the lord still kept a household here. One of them, a great orange fellow with black patches like spilt ink, took it into his head to swim up the weir at the river mouth, which no fish had managed in living memory.

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The water came down the stone in ropes of white, and the spray hung over it in clouds so thick the gatekeeper lost sight of the bottom step. Every evening the koi threw himself at the falls, and every evening the current folded him back down. The steward, Osric Hale, stood on the gatehouse roof with a tankard and laid a silver penny on the parapet each night that the fish would fail again. He never once had to pick it up.

Then came the night of the great rain. The river rose the height of a man, the falls roared like a choir, and the fish went up through the wave-crests with his fins spread wide as sails. Osric dropped his tankard. The koi cleared the lip, hung for a heartbeat in the cloud, and was gone over the top into the dark.

Next morning he was found asleep in the lotus bed at the foot of the wall, pale pink flowers opening round his gills, and Osric's penny lay in the mud beside him. Nobody could say whether the fish had climbed the falls or simply been washed up by them. The lord never did settle the wager, and the carp still rise to the surface at dusk, waiting for someone foolish enough to bet against them.