Blue ink drawing of two koi fish circling in a yin and yang arrangement, surrounded by stylised water swirls, in a Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two koi fish in a yin and yang circle

Japanese · Colour · Flash

Two koi carp swim head to tail in a circle, one dark and one pale, each with a round eye-like mark that echoes the yin and yang symbol. The fish are drawn with fine outlines, scale patterns and shaded fins, with stylised water splashes and curling waves around them. The design is in blue ink on off-white paper, with no body placement shown.

Japanese Koi Fish Water Wave Yin yang Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the pond doesn't bite and neither do I, not before my tea. Now, there were two carp in the millpond below Hallow Wood, the old one and the pale one, and they had swum round each other so long that the reeds had grown a path between them. The dark one, Mother Ashgrove we called her, was all shadow down her back and wouldn't let the sun near her belly. The pale one, Tansy, was silver as a spoon and would take bread from a child's fingers and never a crumb from the miller.

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Every spring the water came up brown from the hills and the two of them chased the same drowned leaf round and round the mill wheel, nose to tail, until the foam rose in curls that looked like the sea had sent its fingers up the bank. Folk here said it was a courting. Folk here said a lot of things, mostly after the second jug.

One autumn the miller's boy dragged the sluice shut to mend it, and the pond sank to a puddle the width of a cart. The two carp were trapped in it together, turning and turning in a circle no bigger than a cartwheel, and each one's eye went round like a moon, one black, one white, looking at the other. By the third night the wind had stopped and the water held still.

And the miller, who had never once in his life given a fish a name, climbed down into the mud with a bucket and a lantern and hauled the sluice open so the water came rushing back through the wheel. The old carp went first, the pale one after, nose to tail, and neither ever came up to the bread again. Mind your steps on the bank going home. The reeds still keep that path.