Line drawing of a tattoo design showing a koi fish above a teal clock face with Roman numerals, surrounded by roots, leaves and flowers, on a peach background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and clock face design

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A koi fish rises above a circular clock face with Roman numerals, its scales drawn in fine linework. Roots, leaves, flowers and small bubbles wrap around the clock and trail downwards. The design uses dark brown linework with stippled dotwork shading, filled with muted teal, orange and sepia tones on a pale peach background.

Dotwork Botanical Koi Fish Clock Roman numeral Root Leaves Flower Swirl Bubble

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

The clock came up out of the shingle the winter the ferry broke on Carrow Skerry, and nobody on the island has ever agreed on which way its hands should point. You are the one who climbs the rock stair each dusk to check the pool beneath it, because the pool is where the koi lives, and the koi is the only thing on Carrow that answers when you call.

Keep reading

Old Mairi from the lighthouse says the fish arrived with the clock, pale and orange as a candle flame, and that it swims against the tide so the water never reaches the harbour before the boats are safe. Her husband's brother swears the roots are sea-kale. You believe nothing until you have seen it, so you crouch on the wet step with your sleeves rolled and watch the speckled water turn slow circles around the brass numerals, bubbles lifting from the weed like breath from a sleeper.

On the night the Morag's lamp fails to show, you carry the tide key up the stair and fit it to the spindle. The hands groan and grit drops into the pool. The koi rises through the reflected sky and stops beneath the XII, its mouth working, and for one long breath the whole rock goes still. You understand then that the fish has never been holding the tide back. It has been holding the hour the ferry went down, so that someone still has time to come home.

You do not finish the turn. You drop the key into the water and watch the koi nose it gently toward the open sea, the wrack trailing behind like the last line of a long letter. When the boats come in at dawn they come in on the wrong hour, and they come in anyway.