Colour tattoo of two koi fish swimming through teal water beneath pink cherry blossom, across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and cherry blossom across a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

Two koi fish, one pink and lilac and one orange, swim in curving teal water across the upper back. Pink cherry blossom branches and a loose petal sit above and beside them, with the fish scales and fins shaded softly. The composition wraps around the shoulder blade, with saturated colour dominating the design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The miller's granddaughter had been feeding the millpond for three days when the two carp began to quarrel over the same crust of bread. The lilac one, Yuki, flashed at the orange one, Kin, and Kin turned so sharply that her gold-edged fins threw a spray across the stones. Hana laughed and tossed in another crust, which only made things worse.

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Her grandmother, hanging wet linen on the willow, said the pair had hatched from the same clutch in the spring of the great flood, and had been arguing ever since about which of them had been carried furthest downstream. Hana thought this a poor reason to quarrel for eleven years, but the carp did not seem to share her opinion. They circled the pond in opposite directions, always meeting at the same bend beneath the cherry tree.

On the fourth morning the wind came up off the hills and shook the blossom loose. Petals settled on the teal water, a pink skin over the surface, and the fish stopped fighting long enough to look up. Hana stopped throwing bread. For a long while nothing moved except the petals, and then Yuki drifted in under Kin's belly and the two of them went round the pond nose to tail, scattering the blossom into the race where it ran away towards the mill wheel.

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