Pen and coloured pencil drawing of two koi fish circling a blue circle filled with white swirls and water splashes, a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Two koi fish around a swirling wave circle

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

Two koi fish, one brown and one pale cream, curve around a central blue circle decorated with three white spiral waves. Splashes of dark blue water surround the fish, with fine ink hatching and scale detail on the bodies and fins. The drawing uses black ink with coloured pencil shading, and the fish and circle are arranged in a balanced, rotational composition.

Japanese Koi Fish Wave Water Swirl Circle Splash

Find an artist for this

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

The moat has been dry since the masons took the sluice gate away, and you are the only one still coming down to check on it. Nobody else remembers the castle had a name. You kneel on the cracked lip of the old well-cover, the round stone with its three carved spirals worn soft by rain, and watch the two koi that have lived in the green water longer than the roof has been gone. The brown one is called Tallow because the lock-keeper's wife named him in a hard winter. The cream one has no name at all.

Keep reading

They circle the stone the way they always do, nose to tail, so close their fins brush the lichen. Tallow sheds a flake of rust-coloured scale against the grey stone. The cream one swings wide, flicks spray onto your boots, and slides under the drowned portcullis where the light goes green and then black. You wait. You count the spirals on the well-cover, three of them, then count again, and the count stays three, which is what your grandmother told you when you were small: the water remembers the way round.

Rain comes in sideways over the curtain wall. Tallow circles once more, then stops and drifts, his mouth working at nothing. The cream one surfaces beside him, and for a moment the two of them hang in the pool like a question and its answer, brown and pale, turning together around the same still centre.

You stand up, knees cracking, and leave them to it. Behind you the castle keeps falling down one stone at a time, and the water keeps going round.