Colour tattoo of two orange and red koi fish curving into a circle around a black Pisces symbol, on a person's calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two koi fish with a Pisces symbol on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two orange and red koi fish swim in a circle, with their heads and tails interlocking around a central black Pisces-style symbol. The scales are shaded with darker red and yellow tones, and the fins are rendered in graded orange with bold black outlines. The tattoo sits on a bare lower leg against a plain background with a warm yellow patch at the edge.

Japanese Calf Koi Fish Circle Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the Institute has been drained twice since the pit closed, and both times you were the one holding the bucket while the council men argued about the silt. Nobody else would touch the water. It smelled of iron and old coal, yet the koi still rose to the surface for the crumbs you shook from your coat pocket, as if nobody had told them the colliery was shut.

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Mr Pryce, the old overman, brought them up from a shop in Swansea in a paint tin, two orange fish wrapped in a carrier bag and a wet towel. He chalked their sign on the gate of the lamp room that same afternoon, two curved fish hooked tail to head with a line through the middle like a seam. 'Every man on the night shift knows that shape,' he said. 'It means you go round and round and nobody gets left behind.' He was dead by the spring, and the fish outlived him by eleven years.

Now the council wants the pond filled with rubble for the new car park. You have one week and a borrowed net. The water is warm where the old pump pipe still runs under the wall, and the bigger fish always finds that corner first. You stand at the edge with the net in both hands and do not lift it yet.

When you finally bring the net down, the smaller fish turns in the mesh and the two of them find the same loop of light, their bodies bending back into one circle. You cannot tell which of them is leading. You lower the net into the water again, hands shaking, and let them go round.