Black line drawing of a koi fish with flowing fins and curling waves, shown as a Japanese style tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish with swirling water design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a koi fish swimming diagonally, with a large flowing tail and fins. Scale patterns, fin rays and the head are drawn with fine, even linework, and stylised curling waves surround the body. The image is monochrome on white, with no shading or colour, and the design fills most of the frame.

Japanese Koi Fish Wave Water Swirl Fin Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud, the sluice on Tank Nine seized up again this morning, so Pell and I spent the whole forenoon with our arms in brine up to the elbow. When the gate finally shuddered open, the big orange and white fish old Tobin used to call Admiral came out of the pipe like a stone skipping off the tide, and we had to chase him round the drained floor with a landing net while he ignored us completely.

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Tobin always said the koi were the only creatures on the platform that understood water properly. He'd point at Admiral's tail and tell me the fine black lines weren't drawn on the scales at all, but were the sea's own memory of every wave it had ever made. I thought he was talking nonsense until I watched that tail beat the water into curls of foam as we lifted him, each fin spreading like a wave that had decided to stop and look at us.

We didn't take him back to the upper pools. Pell said the water up there had gone sour with the new algae, and I agreed, so we opened the outflow to the breakwater channel and let him go. He turned once in the green current, ran his nose against the flow as if testing a door, and then went out past the rusted buoys with his tail hooked into the swell.

I stood on the gantry until there was nothing left but a thin white curl where he'd been, and then the tide came in and smoothed it over, neat as a line closed by a steady hand. Write back soon, and tell me whether the herons have found the new pond yet.