Digital drawing of a red, black and white koi fish with detailed scales and flowing fins on a white background, in a Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish design in red, black and white

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A single koi fish is shown swimming diagonally, with its head at the lower right and its tail fin at the upper right. The scales are rendered in red, black and white with soft shading and fine outlines, and the fins are drawn with feathered edges. The fish is isolated on a plain white background, which suits use as a standalone tattoo design.

Japanese Koi Fish Scale Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the bells of St Aldan's rang five, Mrs Odile Fenwick had already slapped the dough onto the marble and cursed the damp. Her apprentice, Tobin, carried in the coal for the ovens and said nothing about the fish in the cistern, because nobody in Marrowby talked about the fish in the cistern.

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It was a sanke, the old woman said, red and white, though it had gone smoky along its back where the flue soot had settled on the water. It had come up through the drain the winter the mill burned. Every morning she fed it a crust of yesterday's loaf before she touched the flour, and every morning it turned slowly under the lid, showing one white flank, then a red patch, then a flash of black like a shutter closing.

Tobin asked her once why she never cooked it. She laughed until she had to sit on the flour sacks. "Because it's the only thing in this town that knows what day it is," she said. "Bread tells you the hour. The fish tells you the weather."

The morning the frost broke, Tobin lifted the lid and found the cistern empty except for a single scale, red as a cinder, turning on the surface. He pressed it into the dough for the first loaf out of the oven. When Mrs Fenwick cut that loaf at breakfast, the crumb opened in a pattern of fins and small bright rings, and the whole street came to buy it before the sun was properly up.