Illustration of a hairless cat with a Japanese style koi fish, waves and clouds tattoo in blue and black, leaning over a pale hairless cat.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed hairless cat with a koi and waves design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A detailed illustration of two hairless cats. The larger cat carries a Japanese style tattoo of a koi fish, swirling waves and clouds across its back, with a swirl motif lower down, all in blue and black linework and shading. The smaller pale cat stands beside it, with its head turned up towards the tattooed cat, set against a plain grey textured background.

Japanese Cat Sphynx cat Wave Cloud Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The temple cats of Mizuno Hill had almost no fur, which the monks blamed on the hot springs and the children blamed on the monks. Old Tanabe was the largest of them and the only one who had let the carver from the harbour town mark his back. It took three winters. A koi climbed a wave across his shoulders, cloud-curls rose from his spine like steam off the bath, and low down sat a dark whorl the carver called the place where the river forgets itself.

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Tanabe was proud of the ink and would not lie in the grass in case he smudged a wave. His companion Mochi, pale as milk and twice as nervous, had no ink at all, only a habit of curling against that warm blue back on cold nights. In the stone trough below the temple steps lived a single koi, orange gone brown with age, and Mochi's ears turned towards it whenever it rolled over.

Then the spring dried. One morning the trough was a crust of mud and the koi lay on its side, gills working at nothing. Mochi yowled until the monks came, and the monks only shook their heads. Tanabe looked at the steps, then at his own blue flank, and said something rude about carvers. He went down anyway, slid into the mud up to his shoulders, and pushed the fish with his nose until it found the cold channel under the stones.

By evening the ink had run at the edges, and the waves looked like rain on a window. Tanabe didn't care. Mochi slept against him that night, pressed to the faded blue as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, and below them the koi turned once in the deep water, flashing gold where the picture had never been.