Small red and black koi fish tattoos swim diagonally across the back of a hand that holds a brass lantern charm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black koi tattoos across the back of a hand

Japanese · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A hand grips a small brass lantern charm against a plain white background, showing several small koi fish tattoos on the back of the hand and wrist. The fish are drawn with simple dark outlines and filled with red and orange, with black detailing on some of them. The composition is tight and bright, with the fish arranged in a diagonal line across the skin.

Japanese Hand Koi Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ward 7, 02:40. Mr Tolland has asked me again whether the carp in the courtyard pond have been fed. I told him again that they have been living on the same three bags of pellets since the new wing went up and will outlast us all. He smiles at that the way he smiles at nurses younger than his grandchildren, pleased with us and not fooled.

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He gave me the lantern on Tuesday. It was his father's, brass and dented, from the years when the river boats came in after dark, and he wanted it lit at the pond when the porters brought him down to sit outside. Ferrier in the porters' office said it was a fire hazard. I said it was battery-powered with a flicker setting, which is as close to honest as I get after eleven hours on the floor.

Tonight I wheeled him down with the lantern hung off the chair handle. The water was black and the koi came up under the light, red and orange, one with black smudged along its back like a thumbprint on glass. Mr Tolland counted them out loud, the way my father counted cattle through a gate. Seven. He said that was the number he'd bought in 1979 and the number he meant to keep until someone else had to.

I turned the lantern down before we went back up. The fish stayed where the light had been for a long while afterwards, nosing at nothing, as if they were waiting for someone to bring the lamp back. I'll go down again at four, when the ward is quietest, and see if they still come up for it.