Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a red koi fish with a pink lotus flower and turquoise waves on the upper back.

Koi fish and lotus on the upper back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A red and orange koi fish swims diagonally across the skin, with a pink lotus flower above its head and turquoise waves curling around its body. The scales and fins are shaded with dark outlines and soft gradients, giving the fish depth. Bright, saturated colour dominates the composition, with the lotus and fish balanced against the lighter skin tone.

Japanese Back Koi Fish Lotus Flower Wave Water Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You win the fish on the last night of the Michaelmas fair, when the lamps are already guttering and the ring toss has been packed into its crate. Nobody wins at the hook-a-duck after ten o'clock, which is why the old man behind the stall looks startled when your ping-pong ball drops clean into the red-lipped bowl. He fishes out a koi no longer than your thumb, orange as a traffic cone, and tips it into a jam jar with a sigh that smells of paraffin.

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Back in the caravan you set the jar on the sill beside a pink lotus you pressed in a dictionary last summer, now the colour of stewed tea. The fish circles once, then again, searching the glass for a way out. You tell yourself it will be belly-up by Friday. Instead it starts to take the flakes you crumble in, and by the third morning it has outgrown the jar, or you have decided it has.

The fair is due to move on to Thetford at dawn, so before the lorries arrive you carry the jar down to the canal at the edge of the field. The water is cold and brown, and the wash from a passing narrowboat rolls against the bank in long curls, like the ones painted on the stall's canvas. You kneel in the wet grass and tip the jar. The koi hangs in the shallows for a heartbeat, then turns and slides beneath the lily pads, flicking a bright tail at the sky as if it had always known the way.