Colour Japanese-style tattoo of an orange koi carp, purple lotus flowers and grey waves across a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi and lotus on a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large orange koi carp swims upward through grey outlined waves, with pale pink cherry blossom petals scattered above it. Two purple and lavender lotus flowers sit in the lower left, and the fish has shaded scale texture with bold black outlines. The bright orange and warm red tones dominate the composition against the bare skin of the back.

Japanese Back Koi Lotus Cherry blossom Wave Fish Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Hanae said the carp in the mill pond had lived there since before the mill, and that it had never once gone up the weir. Every spring the young ones tried. They threw themselves at the lip of the stone, slapped the falling water with their tails, and slid back into the pool grey and sulking.

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Tomoko was nine that year and had decided the big orange carp would be the first. She pinched bread from the kitchen and crumbled it at the edge of the pond each morning, and the fish came to her, lifting its mouth out of the water like a question. She told it about the lotus flowers in the upper pond, the ones that opened white at dawn and turned lilac by noon, and how their petals drifted down like pink snow whenever the wind came off the hill. The carp listened with one black eye.

On the last morning of the blossom, she found it resting in the shallows, nose to the stones, worn out from the long winter. She slid her hands under its belly and carried it to the weir herself, the water cold and heavy in her arms.

She let it go. The carp found the current, set its tail against the falls, and beat upward like a drum. It did not climb. It passed through the white sheet of water in a flash of red and gold, and it came down on the far side in a spray that caught the sun. Tomoko laughed, and the water laughed back, and behind her Mother Hanae said nothing at all, which was how she said she was pleased.