A tattooist in blue gloves uses a machine to work on a colourful Japanese-style koi fish and wave tattoo on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish tattoo being inked on an arm

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tattooist in blue nitrile gloves works with a tattoo machine on a forearm. The design shows a large orange and red koi fish with grey shading and fine black outlines, framed by stylised cloud and wave linework. The image is mainly warm orange and red against the skin tone, with a red-brown blurred background.

Japanese Forearm Fish Wave Cloud Tattoo machine Glove

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on the lower pond had to be broken by hand every morning that January. My father would not let me use the axe, so I knelt on the frozen boards with a broom handle and tapped at the edge until the crust gave way. Underneath, the water was the colour of strong tea, and the koi lay in it like coins someone had dropped and forgotten. There were nine of them then. Grandfather had carried the first pair over from Osaka in a tin box, or so he claimed, and every winter he swore they knew his footstep on the frost.

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The big orange one, Hana, rose to the hole first that year, slow and deliberate, her mouth opening and closing as though she were reading something written on the sky. Grey cloud shapes had been curling over the hill all week, scrolling and breaking apart above the hedgerows. Father said she was only hungry. I told him she was counting us. He laughed and went to fetch the feed sack, and a gust took his cap across the yard and into the brambles.

The letter had come on Tuesday. The lower pond was to be filled in before the spring sale, the agent said, to make the paddock more marketable. Father read it twice at the kitchen table, then folded it into the stove without a word. He did not mention it again, and neither did I, though I noticed he had started walking the long way round to the barn so he would not pass the water.

That evening I broke the ice once more and pressed a pellet between my fingers. Hana came up through the black gap, cold lips brushing my palm, and took the food with a soft tug. Then she turned back down into the green dark, unhurried, as if the winter had been her idea and she intended to see it through.