Colour Japanese style tattoo of a red koi fish, yellow and blue flower and grey waves covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and flower on an upper arm and shoulder

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large red and orange koi fish swims up the arm, with its head near the shoulder and its tail curling down the upper arm. Grey wave shapes with white highlights surround the fish, and a yellow and blue flower sits beside it, with smooth shading on the scales and petals. Bold saturated colour dominates against the grey background, and the design wraps around the curve of the arm.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Koi Fish Flower Wave Cloud

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 carp in the temple pond had grown so fat that the novices fed them rice from a wooden bowl, and by the third spring the biggest of them, a red one with a pale scar over one eye, had started to watch the waterfall the way a monk watches the gate on a feast day.

Keep reading

Abbot Genkai saw it first. He was sweeping the lower steps with a broom of bamboo split so fine it sounded like rain, and he stopped and leaned on the handle. "That fish wants the falls," he said. Ren, who was carrying the rice, laughed, because the falls were a long grey throat of water coming off the mountain, and the carp was the size of a child's arm. Above the lip of the rock, where the spray broke into little clouds, a yellow lily grew out of a crack no wider than a finger, its petals shadowed blue as dusk.

The fish tried on the first day and fell back. It tried on the fifth and the seventh, slapping the water so hard that Ren's sandals were soaked. On the ninth morning it went up in one long bending leap, through the white water and over the stone, and the spray it left hung in the air above the pool like a second, smaller waterfall. A yellow petal came down onto Ren's rice bowl.

He carried the bowl to the pond and waited, but the carp did not come back for food. Genkai said a fish that climbs the falls becomes a dragon, and Ren said he did not want a dragon, only a fish that knew its supper. The old man only smiled and went back to his broom.

That morning Ren swept the steps more slowly than he ever had, and when he reached the bottom he left the petal floating where it lay.