Black line drawing of a Japanese-style koi fish swimming among lotus flowers and swirling waves, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish with lotus flowers and waves

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A koi fish curves diagonally through the composition, with its scaled body, fins and tail drawn in clean black outlines. Lotus blooms sit at the top and lower left and right, framed by stylised waves, curling water and small bubbles. The drawing uses solid black linework on white with no shading or colour, and the design fills the sheet.

Japanese Koi Fish Lotus Flower Wave Water Bubble Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Owen Gwilliam had been talking to the carp for six years, mostly on nights when the shift had gone badly and the pit baths were too cold to linger in. The pond behind Bryn Row was an old tin bath sunk into clay and edged with brick salvaged from the screening house, and the three koi in it had names his daughter gave them. Missing this morning was Tegan, the gold one with the torn fin.

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Rain had come off the tip all night, black water sheeting down the lane, and when he reached the bottom of the garden the bath had spilled over its rim. Tegan lay against the brickwork, not dead, turning slow circles in the grey run-off. The lotus he had bought from a nursery in Swansea for his wife's birthday, pale pink and stubborn, had torn loose and floated against the fence like a dropped hat.

He crouched in his work trousers and cupped the fish in both hands. The water was as cold as the cage at the bottom of Number Three, and he thought, without meaning to, of the men who had waited down there in 1961 while the sea came through the roof. Then he stood, carried Tegan to the deepest corner of the bath, and slid him in beside the other two. The rain eased. He pushed the broken lotus back to the middle of the water and held it there with one finger until the ripples stopped.

When he looked again, the carp were nosing the flower, and a single bubble rose from somewhere under the orange flank and broke open on the surface.