Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Koi fish and waves on upper back
Japanese · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo
A large koi fish swims upward across the shoulder blade, with its scales, fins and tail outlined in fine black linework and shaded in greys. Stylised waves and water spray curl around the fish, and the design sits against bare skin with a white crocheted top at the lower edge of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Now sit still for this, because the sea never liked being told where to go, and neither did the carp.
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Old Mrs Ashdown ran the coconut shy on Harrow Meadow every summer for forty years. The year the fair came through with the big wheel that squealed like a pig, she hung a painted water-cloth behind her stall. Blue waves with white curled tops, and across the middle a black-scaled fish swimming hard against them. Nobody could say why she painted it that way. The lads on the dodgems said it was bad luck to face the wrong direction.
A boy called Danny Vole came to her one August evening with three pennies and a face like thunder. He had lost his dad's pocket watch somewhere under the waltzer. He wanted a go at the rings, and she said he could have one if he told her which way the fish was swimming.
He said towards the waterfall. She shook her head and told him the fish was swimming away from the sea, up the cloth, to where the paint ran out and the bare canvas began. Then she handed him the rings and said to mind his feet.
Danny never won a ring that night. In the morning the stall was empty, the cloth gone, and on the trampled grass lay a wet black mark shaped like a fish's tail. The pocket watch sat right in the middle of it, ticking, its hands pointing up the meadow.
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