Tall black and white design drawing for a full sleeve, showing cats, bats, waves and a geisha-style figure in a Japanese-influenced style.

Black ink sleeve design with cats, bats and geisha

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A tall vertical design drawn in black ink on a cream background, filling the frame from top to bottom. It is packed with illustrated motifs, including cats, bats, a wolf-like head, a long-haired female figure, a figure with an elaborate hairstyle, clouds, swirling wave shapes and a book at the base. The linework is dense and detailed, with solid black areas and fine hatching, and there is no colour.

Japanese Cat Bat Wave Cloud Geisha Woman Wolf Book Moon Fan Clock Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came through the shutter on the night before the wedding, while the lamps were still lit and Oyo's mother was pinning her hair. It walked over the tatami as if the house had been left to it, sat beside the lacquer box where the wedding fans were kept, and began to wash one ear.

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"Shoo it out," said her mother. Oyo did not. Everyone in Hagi Lane knew the old saying: a cat that enters a house before a wedding has come to collect something, and it is wiser to ask what than to chase it. So Oyo knelt, held out her hand, and waited.

The cat lifted a fan in its teeth, the one painted with a white moon above black waves, and walked out onto the veranda. Bats crossed the lantern light. Oyo followed it past the well to the old persimmon tree, where it dropped the fan at her feet and sat down. The brass clock pinned to the fan's edge had stopped at the hour of her birth, and the moon's painted face looked up at her with no expression at all.

She went back inside and opened the household book, the one her grandmother had kept, and found a line in faded brush: every winter the house would leave rice on the step for the cats of the lane, and the house would never forget. Oyo had forgotten. Her mother had forgotten. At first light she carried a bowl of rice to the step, and the cat came, and ate, and went. When Kenji arrived at the gate with a crane embroidered on his sleeve, the fan in her hand was dry and bright, and the moon's face had softened into something close to a smile.