Japanese style koi fish with orange flowers and waves covering the upper arm and shoulder, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and flowers on upper arm and shoulder

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large koi fish swims upward across the shoulder and upper arm, with orange and yellow flowers and a grey wash behind its head. The fish has detailed black scales with grey shading, while the flowers and fins use orange and yellow ink. The two photos show the same arm from different angles, with the design filling most of the frame.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Koi Fish Flower Wave Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that step, the one without the crisp packet on it. No, the other one. Right. You've been up and down Fenwick House a thousand times and never once looked at the water tank on the roof, which is why you don't know about the carp. Nobody does. My nan knew, because she was the one who fed it.

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Forty years back, the tank had a leak, and the flats below got brown water through the taps for a month. The council sent a man in a van. He climbed up, looked in, and came down white as paper, saying there was a fish in there the length of his arm, orange and black, with a mouth like a bell and a grey cloud of something behind its head, like weather coming. Nobody believed him. Then the taps ran clear, and the fish went on swimming upward through the cold water, past the pipes, all the way to the lid.

Here is the bit they leave out. Every spring the fish rose a little higher, and every spring a flower came up in the stairwell, orange at the edges like a struck match. Tenants found them on the landings, pressed flat against the glass of the lift doors. My nan kept one in a jam jar on the sill until it crumbled to dust. She said a koi that swims upward long enough turns into a dragon, and then it goes over the top of the roof and leaves the rest of us the stairs.

So when you hear the pipes knocking at night, don't go up with a torch. Count the landings and go to bed.