Black and grey Japanese style koi fish, flowers, clouds and waves covering a full sleeve from shoulder to forearm, shown from two angles.

Koi and waves full sleeve

Japanese · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large full sleeve covers the shoulder, upper arm and forearm, centred on a koi fish with scale shading and fin detail. Flowers, cloud forms and stylised waves fill the background and gaps around the fish, with a dark, heavily shaded area behind the upper section. The photograph shows the sleeve from two angles against a black backdrop, with the wearer in a white vest top and no face visible.

Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Koi Fish Flower Cloud Wave Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Carrowgate had seen the carp come up the culvert, but by midnight on the first warm night of June the whole street knew it was there, because the lamplighter had stopped to watch it through the grate. Its scales caught the gaslight one by one, black at the edges and pale in the middle, like a coat of wet slate. Old Mrs Pell swore it was the same fish her husband had fed bread to in the mill pond fifty years before, and that it had been waiting under the city all that time for someone to open a gate.

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Tobias Wren, who kept the chandlery on the corner, did not believe her. He believed in ledgers and in the bolt on his own back door, and he went down to the water with a lantern and a net to prove it was only a fish that had got into the drains. The river was high. Foam came off the weir in ribbons, and the spray hung white under the arches the way clouds do over the sea in the paintings his mother kept.

He never saw the koi clearly. He saw a pale fin rising through a fold of black water, then a wave lifting over the brick like a hand, then a scatter of plum petals turning on the surface where there had been no tree for a mile. He stood there until the lantern guttered. In the morning the net lay folded on his shop step and the chandlery bolt was open. Mrs Pell says he still goes down to the water on the first warm night of June, and that the fish has never once let him catch it.