Colour Japanese style tattoo of two koi fish among teal waves and red clover shapes across a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish and waves across a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

Two large orange and red koi fish swim through stylised teal waves, with red clover shapes filling the gaps across the back. The linework is dark and fine, with soft shading and gradients within the fish scales and fins. The design spans most of the upper and mid back, shown against plain skin on a white background.

Japanese Back Koi Goldfish Fish Wave Clover Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your name badge says Sam in felt-tip, though nobody has called you that since the summer you left Hollins Road, and the sports hall still smells of squash and floor polish. You hover by the urn long enough to be asked whether you're still doing the thing with the bridges. You say you build them now, mostly. Then you slip out past the fire door and cross the back field to the pond, which has been fenced in chicken wire since a Year Four boy went in after a football.

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The water is lower than you remember and greener at the edges, but the two fish are still there, or their grandchildren are. Ruby and Admiral, you named them the spring Mr Pryce let the class vote. Ruby got the orange because she was the bigger one, the greedy one who shouldered in for crusts and sent the other fish spinning. The bet was that whoever kept the winner would take it home at the end of term. Neither of you ever won. Nobody did. The fish just stayed, and the waves you drew on the back of your maths book went on being the only sea either of you had ever seen.

Footsteps crunch on the gravel. Priya Nair, grey at the temples, holding a plastic cup of something pink. 'They moved the pond years ago,' she says. 'The fish went to the caretaker's bungalow in a bucket. Same ones, supposedly.' You look at the water and think about how easily a thing can be carried off and still be called by its old name.

She leaves you there. The sun drops behind the garages and the pond takes the last of the light, and the two fish drift up through the reeds, slow and orange and trailing their red fins like something unfolding. You count them. Two. You go back inside and tell everyone the pond is still there.