Black and grey Japanese style tattoo design of a koi fish swimming among stylised waves, lotus flowers and maple leaves.

Koi fish with lotus flowers and waves

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A koi fish swims diagonally through stylised waves, with its scales, fins and eye drawn in fine black outlines and grey shading. Large lotus blooms sit at the lower left and right, with maple leaves and small blossoms scattered among the wave crests. The composition is dense and balanced, with grey gradients suggesting depth in the water and background.

Japanese Koi Lotus Wave Maple leaf Blossom Fish Water

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the oven, love, the dough won't rise until the window goes grey, and neither will I until I've had my tea. You want the one about the carp that wouldn't stop at the weir? Then mind the flour sack, it keeps the draught off your knees.

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Old Tomasz kept the bakery on Millrace Lane when the river still ran under the back wall. Every spring a koi came up through the grate, grey as slate with black lines round every scale, and it lay in the shallows waiting for the lotus-seed buns he cooled on the sill. He never named it. He said a fish that wants a name is already halfway to being a pet, and a pet will not go home. So it was only the Carp, and it came each morning before the shutters went up and took the crusts from his fingers.

The year the council buried the stream in a pipe, the water came up brown and fast. The Carp went to the grate and found it barred. Everyone said he'd turn back to the canal. He didn't. He went up the storm drain sideways, like a loaf pushed through a tin too small for it, scales scraping the brick, and a wave of muddy water lifted him over the lip into the culvert where the old river still ran. That night Tomasz heard three hard knocks on the back door, as if someone had tapped it with a tail.

Next morning there was a single maple leaf stuck to the sill, and a lotus petal pressed into the flour where the fish had lain. Tomasz swept neither. He baked the buns as usual and set the first one out in the cold. Now hush, the window's turning, and the Carp will be waiting for his breakfast before you are for yours.