Pencil sketch of a koi fish swimming upward past two open blossoms and a bud on a thin branch, a Japanese and botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish with blossoms sketch

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a koi fish swimming upward, with flowing fins and scales sketched along its body. Two open five-petalled blossoms and a closed bud sit on a thin branch that curls around the fish. The loose graphite linework is grey on a plain off-white background.

Japanese Botanical Koi Fish Blossom Flower Bud Branch Scale Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, you'll hear it better sitting. The wind up here doesn't carry a story past the second bend, so you have to lean in. Now. The carp I'm talking about was called Hael, because his mother named him for the sound his father made hitting the water, and she had no patience for anything subtler. He was the colour of wet slate with one orange patch behind the gill, like a coal someone had dropped in the river.

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Every spring the fish of the valley went up the gorge below the pass, and every spring the falls at the top turned them back. The water came down the rock like a stair built by someone who hated stairs. The old ones said only the dragon could leap it. Hael didn't believe in dragons. He believed in the plum tree leaning out over the pool, whose petals kept landing on his back, and he wanted to find where they came from.

He tried for three springs. On the fourth he went up with the blossom falling around him, fins spread wide like sails on a boat that had lost its wind. At the lip of the fall he stopped, because a branch reached over the water with a cluster of pale flowers and a closed bud at its tip, and he saw that the branch was his way through. He pushed his nose into the blossom, the branch bent, the water hit him, and he was carried up and over the stone with his scales catching the light the whole way.

That's the part the travellers never believe. He didn't reach the top of the pass. He reached the pool above, the petals still stuck to him, and he lay in the shallows so pleased with himself that he forgot to be tired. So when you see a carp drawn going up a waterfall, mind the branch. It's the branch that does the work.