Goldfish Tattoo Meaning

Fortune, beauty, cultivation, and ornamental grace.

The goldfish began as a silver carp.

In Tang dynasty China (618–907 CE), people noticed that some silver and brown carp carried a genetic mutation that produced orange and yellow coloration. These were kept and selectively bred — first in ponds, then in ceramic containers, then in increasingly elaborate vessels as the practice moved from monasteries to imperial courts to merchant households. The goldfish arrived in Japan in the 1600s, in Portugal in the 1600s, in England by 1665, in America by the 1850s. It was the first animal ever kept purely for aesthetic pleasure.

The Chinese word for goldfish — jīnyú — is a homophone for 'gold in abundance.' The fish became inseparable from the wish it sounded like. To give goldfish as a gift was to give the wish. To keep goldfish was to keep the wish visible, circling in a bowl on your table, daily evidence of what you were hoping for.

In the European fairy tale tradition — Pushkin's version, the Grimms' version — the goldfish is the granting agent: the fish pulled from the net that offers wishes in exchange for release, the fish that gives what is asked until what is asked becomes too much. The wish-granting fish is almost always a goldfish or is imagined as one. The animal that was bred to look like a wish became the animal through which wishes are granted.

The goldfish's memory is not thirty seconds — that is a myth. Goldfish have been trained to perform tasks requiring memory of up to three months. The fish that was believed to remember nothing turns out to remember quite a lot.

The goldfish tattoo is the cultivated beauty — the thing that was made, not found, whose value was decided by someone who looked at a mutation and saw potential.

Related symbols