Greyscale pencil drawing of two koi fish swimming through stylised waves, a Japanese style tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two koi fish among waves design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

Two koi fish swim in opposite directions, one above the other, with scales rendered in fine hatched and shaded linework. Stylised wave crests and swirling water lines surround both fish and frame the composition. The drawing uses only graphite greys on a pale background, with strong contrast in the shadows under the fins and along the body.

Japanese Koi Fish Wave Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The starter had been sulking since Tuesday, so I fed it twice before the lights came on and talked to it the way my mother talked to her vinegar. By half four the ovens were ticking up to heat and the window over the sink had gone from black to the colour of wet slate. Across the yard the canal lay flat as a baking tray, and the lock-keeper's boy swore there were carp in it, though nobody had ever seen him feed them.

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Two of them came up in the grey as I scored the first batch. One rose beneath the other, both turning, the upper one sliding west while the lower one pushed east, as if they had agreed to pass each other without a word. The water around them broke into small white crests, and I thought of the wave-lines Dimitri used to draw on the back of the proving schedule, and how he said a koi that swims against the current is only showing off, or else it is going somewhere the current will not follow.

I had been going somewhere the current would not follow for eleven years. Opening alone, closing alone, the same flour, the same bell on the door that never rang before seven. The loaves came out blistered and dark at the seams, and I stood in the steam with one in each hand until the canal had lost its shine.

When I looked again the fish had gone under the bridge, one after the other. I wrapped the warmest loaf in a cloth and left it on the step of the flat above the chemist, where the woman who never sleeps would find it when her light came on.