Black ink bamboo stalks and leaves with Japanese-style calligraphy down the back, extending onto the shoulder, with small red seal stamps.

Bamboo and calligraphy across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows black ink bamboo stalks and leaves rising from the lower back up over the shoulder, with vertical calligraphy characters running beside them. Shading is soft and grey-toned in the leaves, with bold solid black strokes in the characters. Two small red seal stamps add the only colour against the dark ink and bare skin.

Japanese Botanical Lettering Back Shoulder Leaves Calligraphy Kanji Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had gone thick on the stone by the time Mrs Ito sent me back to the grinding, and I was sulking over it when the rain started on the shop roof. She did not look up. She had her sleeves tied back with string and a brush as long as my forearm, and she was making a single stalk of bamboo on a scrap of rice paper, one stroke for the joint, one for the leaf.

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"Stop counting the drops," she said. "Count the leaves. They do not all fall at once."

I had come to Kurume that spring to live with my aunt after my mother went into the hospital in Fukuoka, and nothing in the town had yet agreed to be my home. The river ran brown past the back gate, and beside it stood a grove so old that its roots had lifted the path into steps. In the wind the canes bent until their tips touched the water, then sprang back as if nothing had happened. Mrs Ito said that was the whole lesson. Anything that stands straight in a gale will snap.

When the flood came in June, it took the footbridge and most of the lower grove, and I went down with her at dawn to see. The canes that had bent were still standing. The ones that had held themselves proud lay in the mud like kindling. She stood on the bank with her hands in her pockets and said nothing for a long while.

Afterwards she gave me a seal carved from soft grey stone, my name cut in reverse so it would print the right way round. "Now you must answer for what you write," she said, and pressed it into red paste for me. I still have the first letter I stamped with it, a short note to my mother. It says the bamboo is bent but not broken, and I did not need to explain what I meant.