Large Japanese-style back tattoo of a shaded grey Buddha face surrounded by waves, with orange and green maple leaves across the upper shoulders.

Buddha face and waves across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a shaded grey Buddha face with closed eyes, a urna dot on the brow and a curled hair pattern. Black and grey waves with white highlights frame the face, and the upper back has orange and green maple leaves. The composition fills the back from shoulder to shoulder, with the face placed slightly right of centre.

Japanese Realism Back Buddha Wave Maple leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, The face came out of the kiln on Tuesday with a crack running along the left brow, so Aunt Sumi has spent every evening filling it with grey lacquer and swearing at it under her breath. I held the lamp for her. You would have laughed at how careful she was with the little dot between the eyebrows, as though it might lift off and drift down the pass to the sea.

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The waves are the easy part, she says. Water forgives you. The eyes do not. She shaped the lids so they seemed to be listening to something a long way beneath the surface, and when I asked what it was listening to, she told me to keep the lamp still.

The customs men came up the road again on Monday, asking for papers for the carved stone that goes down to the coast every autumn. Sumi showed them the maple leaves she had pressed into the wet clay at the crown, red and gold and blurred by the damp. One of the men picked a leaf off the top shelf and slipped it into his breast pocket without asking. He did not stamp anything. I think he wanted something of the hills to carry down with him.

Write soon, and tell me whether the harbour is as grey as you said. Sumi says the face is finished now, and that it will look out over the water until somebody asks it to stop.