Japanese style flash drawing of a red koi carp with maple leaves, grey swirling waves and a purple lotus, with Japanese characters beside it.

Koi carp flash with maple leaves and waves

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A red koi carp swims head down through a dark grey backdrop of swirling waves and a spiral cloud, with several orange and brown maple leaves scattered across the body and background. The scales are outlined in black with white highlights, and the fins and fish body are filled with flat red tones, while the waves and background use layered black and grey shading. A small grey parasol, a purple lotus and a vertical column of Japanese characters sit in the lower left corner.

Japanese Botanical Koi Fish Maple leaf Wave Swirl Cloud Lotus

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The koi had swum the wrong way up the canal for three nights running, nose down against the current, and Mrs Okonedo at the lock house had stopped pretending it was a fish that had lost its bearings. She left a saucer of bread crusts on the step and told the lock keeper's boy to leave it be.

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On the fourth night the autumn leaves came down off the plane trees in Cutter Street and drifted onto the black water like small, burnt hands. The fish turned slowly under the footbridge where the lamp made a copper coin of the surface. Somewhere up in the sky a spiral of cloud was coming in off the river, grey and curling at its edges, the way the weather does before it decides what it means to do.

The boy came down at midnight with a torch and found the fish waiting, mouth open, as if it had been expecting him. Beside it, caught on the iron rail, a maple leaf had snagged on the thread of a lost kite string. He worked it loose with cold fingers and held it out over the water. The koi rose, took the leaf in its lips without touching his hand, and sank back into the dark with a flick that sent the reflections jumping. Nobody on the towpath ever saw it again, though the lock keeper swore the lotus on the mud bank had opened the next morning, out of season, and that the canal ran a little clearer for a month after.