Colour Japanese style tattoo of a red koi and a pale koi swimming over dark blue waves, on the inner forearm.

Red and white koi fish in waves on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a red koi curling over a pale cream koi, with both fish set against stylised dark blue waves. The linework is bold and black-outlined, with scale detail on the red fish, fin rays, and wave crests shaded in layered blues. The design wraps around the forearm, with the red and blue areas balancing the lighter cream body of the lower fish against the plain skin and dark background.

Japanese Forearm Koi Fish Wave Water

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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

Feed the stove another log, Tomasz, and keep your hands out of the rice wine until I've finished, because the carp is the only reason this inn still has a roof. The pass closed behind you at dusk. Nobody leaves until the thaw, so you may as well learn the story properly.

Keep reading

Two carp lived in the millpond below the old weir, one red as a lantern and one as pale as the skin on boiled milk. The red one was proud and went everywhere at speed, slapping through the reeds and showing off to the herons. The pale one kept to the shallows and let the water tell it where to go. Every spring the meltwater came roaring off the mountain, and the two of them rode it together, the red one curling over the pale one's back to keep it from being dashed against the sluice.

One winter the flood came early, before the ice had gone, and the sluice jammed with branches and dead sheep. The red carp could have shot through the gap above the weir and been halfway to the river by morning. Instead it stayed, turning beneath the pale carp and pushing it upward against the current with its whole body, until the cream fish found the still water under the broken boards. By the time the sluice cleared, the red one had been carried off, and the pale one went on alone, quiet and careful, down to the sea.

That's why the innkeeper's wife, who was a river woman, always left a lamp burning in the window for anyone caught out on the road. Look up at the painting over the door, the blue water and the red scales gone dark with smoke. Sleep now. The lamp is lit.