Close-up of an open mouth with a Japanese style tattoo of red koi carp swimming through green and black waves across the tongue.

Koi and waves tattoo on a tongue

Japanese · Other · Colour · Photo

A close view of an open mouth with a tattoo of red koi carp and stylised waves covering the tongue. The koi have shaded scales and dark outlines, set among pale foam crests and deep green and black wave lines. Red lips and white teeth frame the dark background, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Japanese Other Koi Fish Wave Tongue Lip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The red carp of Lower Mirrowe had grown so broad in the shallows that the millers said she could no longer turn in her own pool. When the autumn floods came over the weir, the king's men dragged her out on a hay cart and drove her to the palace steps, because the king had heard that a fish who had survived three floods could tell the weather by her fins.

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King Aldous of Tarrowmere did not want the weather told. He wanted it ordered. "Sing the water back into the river," he said, and the carp, who had never sung, opened her gills and looked at him with one gold eye until his courtiers began to shift their feet. She said nothing. Instead she turned, slow as a barge, and swam three times around the fountain, each lap leaving a green wake that curled and broke over the marble.

That night the wind came off the estuary with the sea in it. The waves rose higher than the sea wall, and the king stood on the parapet shouting for them to lie down. They did not. Foam came over the walls in pale heaps, soft as wool, and the carp's wake had become the shape of every wave, lifting and falling in lines of dark green and black.

By morning the river had gone back to its banks. The king was found asleep in the reeds with his crown full of sand. The carp was gone too, but the reeds below the weir lay flattened in a long curve, and every fishwife in Lower Mirrowe swore that a red scale the size of a coin lay on the mud, bright as a coal, waiting for someone brave enough to ask it a question.