Black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a skull, koi fish and peony flowers with waves across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, koi and peony on the upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm and part of the shoulder, centred on a shaded skull. A koi fish swims diagonally beneath it, with peony flowers and wave shapes filling the background. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth and soft, giving the skull and fish depth, and the composition wraps around the arm.

Japanese Realism Upper arm Skull Koi Peony Flower Wave Fish

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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

Sit nearer, the lamp is nearly dry and I'll not be shouting over the pit wheel. You'll have heard about Tom Garrow's shaft, how the water came up through the old workings in the wet spring of ninety-one and took eleven men in a single night. What you haven't heard is what came up after them. Their lamps went out one by one down there, and up top the pumps kept churning as if nothing had happened.

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Old Mrs Pryce kept a bowl of red peonies on her step, grown from a cutting her husband had carried out of the Vale. She said the dead men weren't gone, only turned, the way a koi turns in a pond when the light shifts. Every night she set out a dish of rice for the drowned, and every morning the dish was empty and a single scale lay on the stone, silver as a shilling.

One February the youngest Hughes boy went down the wet shaft to fetch his father's tally tin and never climbed back up the ladder. Men with picks worked three days. On the fourth, Mrs Pryce walked to the headgear with her bowl, and a fish as long as a man's forearm rose through the black water. Its back was scored with white flowers and its fins fanned out like a wave breaking on the shingle. It was not the boy. It was the fish, and it had his lamp in its mouth, still burning.

She took the lamp from it, and the fish sank back into the dark, and the pumps stopped that very minute. Nobody has asked her where the boy went, and she has never said. Mind the step on your way out. The peonies have grown over it again.