Colour Japanese style koi fish tattoo in red, orange and yellow with grey swirling water across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish tattoo on the side ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large koi fish swims diagonally across the side of the torso, with its head toward the lower left and its long fins sweeping upward. The scales are shaded in red, orange and yellow, with fine highlights on the body and fins. Dark grey and black wave shapes surround the fish, giving the composition movement and contrast against the skin.

Japanese Ribs Koi Fish Water Scale Wave Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hu Lan had been told the carp that climbed the falls would turn into dragons, and she had believed it until the autumn her brother Wen went up the gorge and came back with grey water in his hair and nothing else. The river below the weir ran the colour of rust that year. Nobody in Ruyang could say why the big fish had stopped coming up from the lake.

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On the ninth morning she took the bamboo net and her mother's copper bowl and walked up past the salt sheds to the place where the current folded over itself. The stones there were slick with a green that looked almost like scales. She waited until the light lay flat on the water, then knelt and lowered the bowl until it touched something heavy and slow.

It was a koi, longer than her arm, its body banded red and gold where the sun caught it, its fins trailing like silk ribbons pulled through ink. It did not struggle. It turned its eye toward her, round and patient, and she understood that it had been waiting for someone to stop shouting about the dragons. "Tell them the gate is open," it seemed to say, though fish do not speak, and she was not sure she had heard anything at all.

She carried the bowl down to the lower pool and tipped it gently. The koi slid out and turned once in the grey swirl, then went up the falls in three quick flicks, a flash of orange against the spray. Wen was standing at the weir when she came back. He looked at the empty bowl and then at her hands, which were wet to the wrist and steady. "It went up," she said. "That is all it ever did."