Japanese style koi tattoo in a yin yang circle, with one fish in orange and one in black and grey, on smooth skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orange and black koi in a yin yang circle

Japanese · Mixed · Photo

Two koi fish swim head to tail in a circle, one in orange and red and one in black and grey, forming a yin and yang shape. Scales and fins are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail, and the black fish has a sharper, more defined outline. The tattoo fills the frame against a plain pale skin background.

Japanese Koi Fish Yin yang Circle

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drum had stopped being worth paying for by the summer the Pellows lost the big top to the wind. What they kept was the tank: a cracked glass box strapped to the back of the yellow wagon, and in it two koi that Nessa Pellow had bought off a man in Taunton for the price of a mule. The orange one was called Sunday and the black one Mr Tallis, after a vicar who had paid to see them and complained about the water.

Keep reading

Every night at nine the ringmaster, Ambrose Pellow, tapped the glass with a brass spoon and the fish went round. Head to tail, orange chasing black, black chasing orange, a slow ring that never quite closed. The handful of farmers left on the benches clapped as if they had been given something. Nobody asked how it was done. Nessa knew it was only that fish follow the nearest thing that moves, and she had spent three winters moving a little ahead of the black one with a net handle until it learned the shape.

In October the bailiff came with a paper and a chain for the wagon wheel. Ambrose wanted the tank sold with the fish still inside it, lot and all. Nessa carried the glass down the lane to the canal at Hobb's Lock before light and tipped the water out over the towpath stones, so the fish went into the cut with it, first the gold one, then the black.

For weeks after, a boatman swore he saw two shapes turning under the lock gates, one burning in the low sun and one dark as wet slate, going round the same patch of water as though someone were still tapping the glass. Nessa never went back to look. She said she had seen enough circles for one life, and she was right about that, though the fish did not seem to have been told.