Black and grey dotwork koi fish tattoo with a mandala background, running across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish with mandala on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A koi fish swims diagonally down the upper arm, with its head and fins wrapped around a layered mandala-style flower. The linework is fine and dark, with the fish scales and fin rays built up from dense stippled dots and fine strokes. The image is black and white, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against a plain dark background.

Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Koi Fish Mandala Flower Lotus Scale Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The settling lagoon behind Sallow Pit had been black for as long as anyone could remember, so when my father came home in March with a jam jar and a fish inside it, my mother put the kettle on rather than shout.

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We called the fish Old Gilt, though he had not been gold since before I was born. Coal dust had settled into his fins and greyed the orange out of him, and the scales along his flank were pricked all over with tiny dark spots, as if someone had tried to count them and given up. He lived among the pond lilies that grew in rings out from the spoil heap, and every evening my father knelt on the wet planks with a heel of bread and talked to him in the low voice he used for nothing else. The lily leaves curled round the fish's head like the petals of a rosette on a chapel window, and when he turned, the fins fanned out in long dark rays, slow as smoke.

The pit shut in October. Men in good coats came with clipboards and said the lagoon would be drained and filled with clean hardcore by spring. On the last dusk my father and I carried a bucket up the bank, the water slopping over our boots, and Old Gilt circled the rim of it as though he knew exactly where he was being taken.

We let him go in the beck below the wood, where the water ran clear over the stones. He hung there a moment under the bridge lamp, then opened his fins one by one, a lily unfolding in reverse, and was gone into the dark. My father stood a long time with the empty bucket. When he finally turned for home, the grey had come off his hands and left only the tiny specks of him in the creases of his knuckles.