Colourful Japanese style koi fish back tattoo across the upper and mid back of a woman seen from behind, with bookshelves in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish back piece

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a large back tattoo of koi fish swimming among swirling, wave-like shapes. The linework is bold and the shading is soft, with red, orange, yellow and green ink standing out against the skin. The tattoo fills most of the frame, with bookshelves filling the background.

Japanese Back Koi Fish Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning Marit climbed the iron stairs of Gannet Point light to fill the cistern, and every morning there were twelve koi in it, not eleven. The extra one was orange at the head and gold at the tail, and it never came up for the bread crusts she threw. Old Tobin, who had kept the lamp for forty years before his knees gave out, said it had come up the storm drain the winter the Marigold went onto the reef, and that it would stay as long as the light did.

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"A koi that fights its way up the falls turns into a dragon," he said, holding his tea with both hands. "Our falls are the stairs. Every man who climbs them to keep the light is climbing for something." Marit said that was a tale for the tourists, and Tobin only smiled and asked whether the clockwork had caught yet.

It had not. On the night the fog came in thick enough to swallow the foghorn, the weight chain jammed a turn short of the top and the great lens began to slow. Marit wound it with the crank until her palms blistered, then stopped and listened to the water in the cistern below, churning as the fish swam hard against the pipe. She counted its strokes the way Tobin had taught her to count the seconds between flashes, and matched her turns to them.

By dawn the fog had lifted and the lamp had never once dimmed. The cistern was calm, and there were twelve fish in it, the orange one nosing at the glass as if it had been waiting for her to notice. She fed them all, the orange one last.