Colourful Japanese-style koi fish tattoo with pink cherry blossoms on the forearm, in watercolour-like pink, yellow and blue.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and cherry blossom on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A koi fish with a large stylised eye fills the upper part of the forearm, surrounded by pink and purple cherry blossom flowers and swirling fins. The outlines are fine and dark, and the fills are soft, blended washes of pink, yellow, blue and green with a watercolour effect. The fish curves diagonally across the arm against a plain light background.

Japanese Forearm Fish Cherry blossom Flower Eye Fin Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the lamp is only good for one face at a time. No, this tale is not about the bridge. That comes after the rain. Today is the fish, and the fish is older than the bridge and sulkier than the rain.

Keep reading

Out past Greenwharf, where the sea had taken the tram sheds and left the canals standing full of green water, there lived a koi called Mabel Sorrow, though nobody gave her that name except the gulls. She was the colour of a fever dream, pink at the head, gold along the flanks, with blue running under her scales like weather over a field. Every spring the cherry trees that had survived the salt put out their blossom on the tangled towpath, and every spring the petals fell on the water and she came up to eat them, one by one, watching the people on the bank with a single round eye that seemed to know the price of everything.

A boy named Tobiah Quill, who mended pumps for the cistern-folk, decided he would catch her. He built a net from fishing wire and old hammock cord and waited three nights. On the third, the moon rose so bright it turned the canal to tin, and the koi lifted beneath his net and spoke in a voice like a bell under water. "You may keep one thing of mine, but only the thing you can carry without your hands." He thought of gold. He thought of the pump money. He opened his mouth and said, "Your eye," because it was the first thing he saw.

She laughed, or the canal did, and he woke on the towpath with blossom stuck to his cheek and nothing in his hands at all. Ever since, the drowned water shows you what you came looking for, and the petals never sink. Mind your own eyes on the way home. I have charged you nothing for the telling, which is more than the gulls ever did.