Koi fish line drawing design
Japanese · Black and grey · Flash
A single koi fish is drawn in black ink, turning upward with its mouth open and whiskers trailing. Its body is filled with overlapping rows of scales, and the large fins and tail are shaded with fine parallel lines. The design is rendered in black linework on a plain cream background, with no colour or shading.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The koi had been swimming against the current of the Kanda canal for three seasons when the old lock-keeper's daughter first noticed it. Her name was Mizuho, and she was the only one in the village who still counted the carp at the sluice gates each morning, pencil behind her ear, a ledger open on the railing. Forty-one, then forty, then forty-one again. The big orange one with the ink-dark patch above its eye was never missing from the count, though nobody could say where it went at night.
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In the autumn the water dropped and the children began to dare each other to touch the gate chains. Mizuho found the koi wedged in the shallows below the weir, its mouth working at the air, its long whiskers trailing like wet thread across the mud. She knelt in her good stockings and cupped water over its gills until the fins began to move. It did not thank her. It turned its head, looked up past her shoulder at the moon sitting on the rooftops, and rolled upward through the lock as if climbing a staircase no one else could see.
The next morning the ledger said forty-one. Mizuho did not write the number down. She sat on the railing with the pencil in her hand, watching the scales catch the light in their overlapping rows, and waited for the tail to flick once beneath the surface, the way a signature closes a letter.
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