Full-colour Japanese style koi fish design drawn in red and orange with white wave lines and a black and grey swirl behind it, shown as a flash drawing with no body placement.

Koi fish with swirling waves design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A red and orange koi fish swims diagonally across the page, its scales shaded in darker reds and highlighted with white dots. White wave crests and fine black outlines surround the fish, with grey wash water spray at the lower left and right. A black and grey spiral and dark brushed bands fill the background, giving the composition a strong contrast against the white paper.

Japanese Koi Fish Wave Swirl Water Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hear me, children, and do not fidget, for the river has no patience with fidgeters. In the kingdom of Ashvale, where the mill wheels turned slower than the clocks and the rain came sideways on Thursdays, there lived a red koi named Oloran who had been born in the mud of the lower sluice. Nobody expected much of a fish that colour of rust, but the miller's daughter, Wenna Harrow, fed him crumbs of bread every morning and told him he was the finest thing in the millpond.

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One autumn the sluice gates jammed and the water began to swirl in a grey spiral, faster each day, until the pond boiled like a kettle and the old willows bent down to drink from it. The villagers said a drowned king lived at the bottom and wanted his crown back. Oloran heard them muttering from the bank and decided that a fish with ideas above his station ought at least to have a look for himself.

He dived into the spiral where the white spray rose like hands. Down in the dark he found not a king but a cartwheel of old iron, wedged across the outflow, and the miller's wooden clogs, and a single gold ring. He pushed and pulled until the wheel groaned free, and the whole pond exhaled. When he surfaced at dawn, Wenna was on the bank with her apron full of bread, and she did not throw any of it. She simply wept and held it out to him, and he took it, because that is what fish do when they have been thanked properly.