Black and grey koi fish tattoo arranged in a yin yang circle on the calf, with fine scale shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi fish yin yang on a lower leg

Japanese · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two koi fish swim head to tail inside a circle, forming a yin yang shape with a solid black background on one side. The linework is fine and the scales are rendered with soft grey shading, giving the fish depth and texture. The tattoo is centred on a hairy lower leg against a plain pale background.

Japanese Calf Koi Fish Yin yang Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby had worked the lock at Hythe Bridge since her father's hands went stiff, and she knew the river well enough to tell when something was wrong with it. That spring the two orange-and-black koi that lived below the sluice gates stopped swimming apart. They turned together, head to tail, round and round the eddy where the old barge Harriet was moored, until the water looked like a dropped coin.

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The bargeman, Tom Coyle, came up from the Harriet one wet morning with a bucket and a face like wet paper. "They're not fish," he said. "Not any more. My mother told me they were a pair split at a wedding, one bound north with the salt boats, one left to keep the water." Nell did not believe him, but she watched anyway. Every dusk the dark koi came up to the lamp-lit side of the lock, and every dawn the pale one came to meet it at the shadowed edge, and they met exactly where the light and dark ran together.

Tom fell ill in the autumn and the Harriet was sold to a man from Gloucester who had no patience for stories. On the morning she left, Nell walked the towpath to the bend and found the water still. She tipped a handful of bread in regardless. Two shapes rose through the grey, one dark, one pale, and though they did not touch, they circled once, slow as a clock hand, before turning back toward the sluice.

Nell kept the gates oiled and the bread coming, and in the spring the bend below the sluice was never quite empty again.