Vivid watercolour-style koi fish with green lily pads and blue ink splashes tattooed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and lily pads on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A koi fish in orange, red and yellow swims across two green lily pads, with black outlines defining the fins and body. Loose blue and turquoise wash splashes sit behind and beside the fish, and a thin blue streak trails down the right edge. The design is shown on bare skin along the side of the torso, with the fish's tail extending downward across the frame.

Ribs Koi Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on the stock pond had gone the colour of dishwater at the edges, and Mags was already breaking it with the heel of her boot when Tom came down the lane with the bucket swinging. 'Leave it,' he said. 'Dad would have a fit.' She didn't leave it. Under the crust, something orange moved, slow as a thought, and she crouched on the frozen mud with her knees going numb until she could see the whole of it.

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It was the old koi, Duchess, that their father had carried home from Chester market in a plastic bag forty winters back, when the pond was only a hole behind the cowshed and the lily pads were a rumour. Nobody had fed her since her hip gave out in October. Tom said the cold would finish her. Mags said nothing, because she had been saying nothing since the funeral, and the silence between them had a shape now, like the pond, something you walked around every morning.

Beneath the ice, pinned flat against the surface, a single lily pad had survived the frost, green as a bruise healing. Duchess slid under it and turned, and the low sun came through the white crust and caught her flank, red and gold, with a smear of blue from the sky held in the water above her. Mags had never seen her look so much like a thing that belonged somewhere else.

She stood, took the kettle from Tom's hand, and poured it slowly over the ice until the hole widened to a dark mouth. The water steamed. Duchess came up through it, unhurried, and rested beneath the lily pad as if she had been waiting all winter for someone to ask her to stay.