Colour Japanese style tattoo of two koi fish and pink blossoms with swirling linework across the upper thigh and hip.

Koi fish and blossoms on a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two koi fish curve around each other, with pink and orange blossoms placed between them and swirling wave-like linework across the lower area. Fine black outlines define the fins and scales, which are shaded in brown and grey with orange and blue accents. The design wraps diagonally over the hip and thigh of a person lying on a tattoo chair, with the skin tone and background towels visible around it.

Japanese Thigh Koi Fish Blossom Flower Swirl Scale Fin Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the Okada house had been dug by my grandfather the year the rice failed, and every koi in it had come from a farmer who owed him a favour. Two of them, a pale-bellied one with a crown of dark scales and a red-gold one the colour of a late persimmon, had spent their lives circling each other so closely that the children said they were stitched together at the tail. My sister Mariko swore they could talk. I thought she was only lonely.

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The winter the cherry tree came down in the storm, the red-gold fish stopped eating. He drifted near the surface with his fins folded flat, and the pale one stayed beside him in the shallows, nudging him back toward the stones whenever he tried to sink. Mariko sat on the edge every evening with a bowl of crumbled rice cake, talking to them both in a voice I had not heard her use since our mother died.

In spring, the blossom from the fallen tree had dried into the mud at the water's edge, and somehow the petals had worked their way into the reeds. One morning the pale fish rose, slow and deliberate, and circled the red-gold once, twice, three times, leaving a ring of silver ripples that carried a single pink petal out toward the sun. The red-gold turned and followed it. Mariko laughed until she cried, and then she went inside and asked me, very quietly, whether I would help her plant a new tree.