Four-panel photo of a Japanese style forearm sleeve with a grey koi fish, pagoda, waves and red maple leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Koi, waves and pagoda forearm sleeve

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A four-panel collage shows one forearm covered in a Japanese style sleeve. The design includes a pagoda at the top of the forearm, with a large scaled koi fish and stylised waves wrapping around the arm toward the wrist. Shading is mainly grey and black, with red and orange maple leaves adding colour across the piece.

Japanese Forearm Koi Wave Maple leaves Fish Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, the snow reached the upper pass on Tuesday, two weeks earlier than Father said it would, and the carters have stopped coming up from Hoshimizu. I am writing this at the table by the stove with the lamp turned low so the ink doesn't freeze on the nib.

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The pagoda on the ridge has five roofs now, because the masons finished the top one the week you left. Mother said it would never stand in a wind like that, and it has stood through three storms. Below it the old pond still holds the big orange and black koi that the widow Sato fed by hand every morning. Nobody has fed it since her funeral. I went down with a bag of barley on Sunday and it came up through the skin of ice as if it had been waiting, its mouth opening and closing like a question.

The maples along the path have gone red, and their leaves blow into the pond and turn in the eddies the way the carved waves do on the temple gate. I tried to explain that to the surveyor from the prefecture, and he only wrote down "decorative". He doesn't know the river under the pass runs faster than any horse, or that the fish always swims against it.

I have decided to stay through the winter. The pond will freeze over, but the koi will sit deep under the ice and wait, the way the old woman told us it would. When the thaw comes I will be at the rail with the barley, and if you want to see it, you know the road. Come up before the snow closes it. Bring Father's lantern, the one with the cracked glass.