Colourful koi fish with lotus flowers tattooed on the upper thigh, drawn with loose, watercolour-style washes of teal, green, pink and orange.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and lotus flowers on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A koi fish swims diagonally across the thigh, its head at the upper left and its tail fanning out at the lower right, with fine patterned scales drawn in dark ink. Two pink and orange lotus flowers and a few leaves sit behind the fish, and loose splashes of colour extend beyond the outlines. The colour is dominant, with teal and green on the fish and warm pinks and oranges on the flowers, set against plain skin.

Thigh Koi Fish Lotus Flower Leaf Water Splash

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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

You have kept the moat under Harrowgate Keep for longer than anyone in the village can count, nosing between drowned masonry and the rusted teeth of the old drawbridge chain. The water is brown in the shade and green where the sun reaches. The lotus Aunt Mair planted the year of the flood has spread across the north corner until it hides the sunken stones. You do not mind it. The pads give you somewhere to rest in the afternoons, where the heat of the wall comes down through the leaves.

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The children come to the parapet in August with bread and bent pins on string. Mair's grandson Owen lies on his stomach and calls you Pendragon, which is wrong, because you were never a king's. Every summer he tells you the same secret, that he will leave for the coast and buy a boat with a red sail. You rise when he drops crumbs, and every evening he goes home before the lamps are lit.

The autumn the lotus flowered pink, he did not come. Brambles took the path. The bread stopped. You kept your figures of eight through the cold, under ice that thinned where the sun found it, and the leaves that had sheltered you rotted down into black silt.

In March the bank filled with boots and a stranger's dog. Owen came last, grey at the temples, a rolled canvas under his arm. He knelt where he always had and dropped a single crust. You rose, took it, and turned once in the green water so the light could catch the gold along your back. He laughed, and for a moment he was eleven again, waiting for the fish.