Colour tattoo of a koi fish and pink lotus flower with teal waves across the upper back and shoulder, in a Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and lotus on a shoulder

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A koi fish swims across the upper back and shoulder, with a pink lotus blossom above its body and teal waves curling around it. The fish has grey shaded scales with dark outlines, while the lotus uses pink and magenta tones with bright highlights. The view is close, with a white strap of clothing visible at the right edge and the head cropped out of frame.

Japanese Back Shoulder Koi Fish Lotus Flower Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Little Wenning the week the river ran brown, and with it came the fish tank, a glass box on iron wheels that the old showman, Tobias Crane, swore held a carp older than the fair itself. Nobody believed him. Mab Oddie, who rowed the coconut boat across the mill pond every dusk, said she had seen it once, a grey shadow with a gold edge sliding beneath the lily pads where the water went shallow.

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That August the pond went still and warm, and a lotus opened in the middle of it, pink as a fingernail, which was wrong for the season. Tobias came down the bank with a net and a face like wet paper. "It has to go back," he said. "Every fair takes one fish out of a river, and the river wants it returned." Mab asked what became of the ones who didn't go back. He did not answer. He only looked at the tank, where the glass was cracked along one side.

They waded in together at dawn, the water up to Mab's ribs. The carp came to the net as though it had been waiting for someone to say the time had come. Its scales were the colour of old pennies, and the teal water curled off its tail like the edge of a flood. She held it in the shallows until it stopped thrashing, then opened her hands.

The carp turned once, took the lotus bloom gently in its mouth, and was gone. Tobias sold the tank for scrap that winter and never told the story again. Mab kept rowing, and when the fair came back the next summer, nobody in Little Wenning ever lost a penny to her coconut stall, and the lilies on the mill pond did not open out of season again.