Drawn koi fish tattoo design in a Japanese style, with black scales, orange-gold fins and a red gill, beside the headline The Meaning Behind Koi Fish Tattoos.

Koi fish tattoo design with headline

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A koi fish swims upwards in a curved pose, with a black body covered in white-outlined scales, a yellow eye and a red patch behind the gills. Its fins and tail are shaded in orange and gold with fine hatched linework. The fish sits on a plain white background to the left of a black serif headline reading The Meaning Behind Koi Fish Tattoos.

Japanese Traditional Koi Fish Scale Fin Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the fishmonger's had been drained twice that spring, and both times the old carp came back up from the mud as if nothing had happened. Mrs Okonedo swore it was the same fish. Her grandson Tobias swore it was a different one every year, passed down like a teapot. Nobody in Saltwick Cove had ever settled the question, least of all the gulls, who stood along the wall each morning waiting for the bread that never came.

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On the last Tuesday of May the tide came up the lane and stopped at the church steps, and the water in the pond went black and still. Tobias found the fish floating on its side near the sluice gate, scales dull as old pennies. He lifted it with both hands and it turned over, slow and deliberate, and looked at him with one gold eye. Then it sank out of his grip and slid down the drain pipe into the sea like a letter posted through a slot.

That evening he sat on the wall with his feet over the water and watched the harbour lights come on one by one. Something moved far out past the breakwater, a curl of orange and dark, climbing against the swell with its mouth open toward the sky. He told nobody, because nobody would have believed a fish could swim that far. He only knew that the pond had been empty for three days, and the gulls had stopped waiting.