Red koi fish with a white lotus flower and grey water swirls in Japanese style across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and lotus on the upper back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A red koi fish swims diagonally across the upper back, with its head at the lower right and a white lotus blossom at the upper left. Grey wave and water swirls surround the fish and flower. The red scales are shaded with darker tones, and the lotus petals are pale cream with green tints.

Japanese Back Koi Fish Lotus Flower Water Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is small and the wind has teeth tonight. You want to hear about the pond below the willows, the one the charcoal burners will not drink from? I will tell you what my grandmother told me, and she had it from a woman who sold eggs at the mill.

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There was a red koi in that pond, longer than a man's arm and the colour of brick just pulled from the kiln. Every morning she rose to the surface and took a single bite of the white lotus that grew at the far edge. Every morning the miller's daughter, Hanne, came down with her bucket and told the fish about the boy who had gone to the coast and never written.

The water, they say, did not like being talked over. One autumn the flood came down off the ridge, grey and fast, and tore the bank open. The lotus was dragged under. The koi went after it, forcing herself against the current, her scales scraping over the stones, until the river had nothing left to carry but spray and foam curling white like the crests of a painted wave. She brought the last flower up in her mouth, and the river, tired of her, let her go.

Hanne never saw the boy again. But every spring the lotus comes back to that pond, and the red fish turns slow circles beneath it, and if you go down with a bucket at dawn you will hear her, very quietly, telling you what the water has been keeping for her.