Japanese style full sleeve tattoo on an arm showing a koi fish, rolling waves, lotus flowers and a skull, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi, waves and lotus full sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Three views of a full sleeve tattoo on an arm, showing an orange koi fish swimming through stylised white-edged waves, with a yellow fish near the top. Lotus flowers and a skull with red and orange detailing sit lower down the arm. Bold outlines and layered shading give the piece a rich, saturated look, and the three angles show how the design wraps around the limb.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Koi Fish Wave Water Lotus Flower Skull Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stew had caught on the bottom of the pan again, and Ruth Okonedo swore at it in the flat Hull voice she kept for the galley alone. Through the porthole the swell came up grey and then white at the crest, folding over itself like lace on a Sunday cuff. The Mary Ann Lowe rolled, and the pan slid a hand's width across the gimbal before she caught the handle.

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Her father had painted the tin on the shelf above the sink, a biscuit tin he'd bought in Scarborough the summer before he died. He'd kept koi in a concrete pond behind the terrace, and he'd never once let her feed them bread, only pellets from a yellow bag. On the lid an orange fish climbed through a curl of blue water, its fins spread like a dress lifted off the floor. Ruth had never told anyone that she talked to it on the bad nights.

Danny came down the companionway soaked to the elbows, grinning at the sea like it owed him money. The skipper wanted breakfast in ten minutes, he said, and a pot of something hot for the men on the hauling deck. Ruth nodded and ladled the broth into a steel jug, then reached for the tin and found it was already warm from the stove rail where it had sat all night. She set it under the lamp and turned the lid until the koi faced the door, the way her father always had, so the fish would be the first thing the men saw when they came in out of the weather.