Koi and Aquatic



Collections

This collection traces back to 2004–2006, when most of these pieces began life as simple line drawings, sketched out long before any digital color touched the page. The koi themselves draw heavily on traditional tattoo art, bold linework, sweeping fins, and the kind of stylized confidence you'd find on tattoo flash sheets, reimagined here as standalone illustrations rather than ink. Around that central thread, the collection branches out into a broader underwater world: a quiet goldfish tank, a fanciful gathering of horned sea serpents, an ornate koi pond rendered like patterned porcelain, and one true outlier, a realistically rendered trout that breaks from the line-drawing tradition entirely. Together, the pieces capture two decades of returning to the same fascination with water, scale, and fin, filtered through whichever style felt right at the time.
01 - GoldfishA pair of goldfish drift through a quietly layered tank scene, each element drawn from a different point in the collection's history. The fish themselves started as a 2007 charcoal rendering, and that hand-drawn softness still shows in their slightly droopy, unimpressed expressions, these two look thoroughly unbothered by their surroundings. The background comes from scanned, hand-painted paper, while the leafy plants date back even further to 2003 line drawings. Glass marbles and bubbles were pulled from older reference images and reworked digitally, and the scattered rocks began as line drawings of their own, with the sandy floor built entirely on the computer. The result is a tank that feels lived-in and a little sleepy, fitting, since the fish themselves clearly couldn't be more bored by the whole thing.
02 - Koi in waterA golden koi curls gracefully through stylized waves, its scales rendered in warm layered gold and amber, cherry blossoms scattered around it like they drifted down from somewhere just out of frame. The bold linework and dramatic, sweeping water patterns are pure traditional tattoo art, confident, graphic, and built for impact, while the koi's wide, soulful eyes give it an unexpected gentleness against all that motion. This is one of the strongest pieces in the collection, a longtime favorite that served as a flagship image for your art for good reason: it's striking enough to stop someone mid-scroll and detailed enough to hold their attention once it does.
03 - Jess FishRendered entirely in colored pencil, this koi curves through the same confident tattoo-style linework as its companions, but trades the traditional gold palette for cool blues and soft salmon pink. The choice wasn't arbitrary: this piece, created for a close friend, was given an unconventional color scheme to match someone who was anything but traditional. Soft pencil shading gives the scales a gentler, more tactile quality than the digitally inked pieces nearby, scale by scale, fin by fin, built by hand rather than by cursor. It's part of a trio of koi made around the same time, each one a little different, each one made for someone specific.
04 - Brooke's KoiA radiant golden koi twists upward through a column of rising bubbles, its scales rendered in warm shades of yellow and orange that deepen to a fiery red at the tail. Created in colored pencil as part of the same trio as Jess Fish, this piece carries a traditional gold palette and the same hand-drawn warmth and careful scale-by-scale shading found throughout the set. The wide, expressive eye and slightly playful tilt of the head give it real personality, equal parts elegant and a little mischievous.
05 - Tank SerpentsFour small, big-eared serpents coil and peer curiously around a softly lit tank, their fanged grins and oversized ears giving them a personality somewhere between dragon and mischievous house pet. Originally drawn in the early 2000s as line work, then revisited and updated around 2015, they carry that same gentle, slightly whimsical charm, more curious than menacing despite the teeth. As the story goes, this little crew teleported straight into someone's fish tank, apparently with the very serious job of keeping an eye on the fish, peeking out from behind glowing marbles and clusters of greenery like they're on watch duty rather than just decoration.
No. 06 - Trout Rendered in deep teal-blue with traditional charcoal shading at its core, this trout breaks from the rest of the collection's tattoo-flash style for something more naturalistic, every fin and scale carefully observed rather than stylized. It's framed by an ornate, almost wallpaper-like backdrop of filtered illustrations and gold scrollwork, with a few familiar plant elements borrowed from the cute aquarium series anchoring it back to the rest of the collection. The trout was originally meant to launch a larger project, the planned "Blackfish Chronicles," envisioned as a series exploring more freshwater fish beyond koi and goldfish. That series never fully came together, but the trout remains as a striking reminder of where it might have gone, the one true realist in a collection otherwise built on bold linework and stylized color.
No. 07 - Koi Pond A translucent, ghostly koi curls through a soft lavender pond scene, layered over lily pads, butterflies, and faint circular motifs in muted gold and olive. Dating back to 2005–2006, this is one of the earliest pieces in the collection, sketched as a line drawing during a period when most reference imagery was being pulled from the internet, back when the available image quality was more rough than what's accessible today, which lends the piece a slightly hazier, more abstract quality than its later companions. Older design elements were folded into the background as well, giving the whole composition a layered, almost archival feel, fitting for a piece that's something of a time capsule from the collection's earliest years.