Full back tattoo of a red koi fish swimming among pink cherry blossoms and water swirls in Japanese style, across the upper and middle back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and cherry blossom on a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large red koi fish curves up the back, with its fins spread and scales shaded in deeper red and grey. Pink cherry blossom branches and loose petals drift around the fish, with white water swirls behind it. The bold colour fills most of the frame, and the design is centred on the spine.

Japanese Back Koi Fish Cherry blossom Petal Water Wave Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Lower Harrow ran between two countries that had never agreed where the middle of it was, and the only crossing was a wooden gate kept by a toll-keeper called Idony Pell. Every spring the snowmelt came down brown with silt, and the carp came up from the sea to spawn in the shallows below the weir. Idony left a dish of rice on the sill for whatever came to the water at night, and nobody had ever asked her to account for it.

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The night the red carp came, the gate was already barred. A boy from the far bank had come over the ford at dusk with a fever and a letter, and the officer on the near side had said the seal was wrong and the pass was void. The boy sat down in the reeds and wept. Idony heard a splash below the gate, then a long slow sound like silk drawn through a ring, and when she leaned over the rail there was a carp as long as her arm, its fins spread wide and its scales dark at the edges, holding the boy's letter above the water in its mouth.

Idony took the letter in her wet hands. The carp turned and went up the weir, which no carp had ever done, its body bending against the white water until it reached the top and was gone. Blossom from the trees on the bank came loose and drifted down after it, pink on the foam. In the morning the officer found the gate unbarred and the letter sitting dry on the sill beside the rice. He read it twice, stamped the pass, and said nothing. The petals were still turning in the eddy when the boy walked across, and nobody on either bank could say afterwards whose side of the river he had been standing on.