Realistic colour tattoo of a pale water lily with green lily pads and an orange koi on a person's upper back.

Water lily and koi on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large water lily in pale peach and yellow dominates the upper back, surrounded by green lily pads and a submerged orange koi. Soft shading gives the petals and pebbles depth, and concentric ripple rings spread across the water beneath the flower. The image is framed from behind, showing the back of the head, and a classical white sculpture sits in the background.

Realism Botanical Back Koi Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the salt pans on Inch Ferran had never frozen, not in the hardest winter anyone could remember, and the old women said that was because of the orange fish. Nobody had carried them there. They had come up the burn in a flood the year the sea took the western causeway, three fish as long as a hand, and they had stayed.

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Tamsin Hay, who kept the lighthouse keeper's hens, was the first to ask the pond for something. She was fourteen, and her brother had gone out on the Morag and not come back. She knelt on the flat stones at the edge and dropped a pebble from her pocket, a grey one with a white band, and watched the rings spread until they touched the wall. Under the water the largest fish turned once, slowly, like a page being read.

The lily came up that night, pale as butter at the centre and blushing at the tips, floating on a pad as wide as a cartwheel. Nobody had planted it. Tamsin told her mother it was the wrong flower for a drowned boy, and her mother said the pond had never asked her opinion.

Years later a boat came in with a grey-haired man aboard who stood at the wall and asked for water to drink. Tamsin gave him a cup from the mere. He looked down at the rings still going out across the water and said, 'Your brother skimmed stones better than anyone on the island,' then went up the road before she could ask him how he knew.