Promotional sheet of tattoo-style drawings showing a koi carp with a ribbon and a Tattoo Art banner, plus stipple and outline brush samples, with no body placement.

Tattoo-style brush samples with koi carp design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows three tattoo-style drawings: a Tattoo Art banner with brushes and pencils, a cartoon koi carp wrapped in a teal ribbon reading I heart Koi Carp, and a row of stipple shading and ink outline brush strokes. The koi uses bold outlines with dotted shading on its scales and fins, and the banner uses stipple texture for shadow. The drawings are set on a cream, torn-paper background with orange and teal accents and black linework.

Traditional Dotwork Banner Pencil Stipple Outline Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind Hollin Mill had been dug by men who wanted water for their wheel, and it had never once been empty since. Old Marrow, who kept the sluice, said the carp in it were older than the mill, and that the big red one with the sulky mouth was older than the rest. Children were told not to feed her bread. They fed her anyway, crumbs pinched off at the bridge while the miller's wife was not looking.

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In the dry summer of the year the ford went under, a boy named Tobin Greave came down to the water with a stolen heel of loaf and a question he had been practising all the way along the lane. Why did she never come up to the surface for anyone but him? He had heard she kept a ribbon in the reeds, a strip of teal silk that a drowned girl had tied round her fin to keep her from wandering. He did not believe it. He wanted to see.

He sat on the warm stone and held out the bread, and the fish came slow, scales catching the light like hammered copper. She bumped the crust with her nose. Then she turned on her side and nudged the silk toward him with the blunt point of her mouth, and he saw the letters stitched along it, uneven and bold: I heart koi carp, the work of a girl who had been too young to spell heart properly.

Tobin took the ribbon in both hands. When he looked up the pond was full of fish rising, and the mill wheel had stopped turning, and somewhere up the lane his mother was calling him in to supper. He tied the silk back where it had been, and left the rest of the loaf on the stone for whoever came next.