Black and grey Buddha face with pink blossoms, a pagoda and a coloured lotus across an upper arm, in a Japanese style sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Buddha face, pagoda and lotus upper arm sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large sleeve tattoo shows a serene Buddha face with closed eyes, a pagoda rising behind it and swirling waves and smoke lines wrapping around the design. The face and clouds are rendered in smooth black and grey shading with soft highlights, while the pink blossoms and purple and red lotus flowers at the base add strong colour. Two views of the same arm are shown side by side, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Japanese Realism Upper arm Shoulder Buddha Lotus Blossom Wave Smoke Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the band are on their break and I've only the one good voice left in me, so you'll have to lean in. Mind the spilt lemonade. You want to know about the head on the shelf behind the bar, the one with its eyes shut as if it's heard every fool's story and found none worth opening up for. My grandfather Ezra brought it ashore at Hull in 1931. He was ship's carpenter on the Mary Ann Calder, and the crate had come off a steamer from Kobe with a label nobody aboard could read.

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The sea had been up for three days by then. Waves stood on their tails and smoked like Sunday kettles, and the crate broke its lashings in the hold and went rolling from bulkhead to bulkhead. Ezra swore it stopped dead at his boots, the way a dog stops when it finds its owner. He cut the rice paper away with a cold chisel and there it was, grey as wet slate, with the eyes closed and a small smile at the corners, as if it knew exactly how the storm would end.

He carried it up Scale Lane to the Palais, where he'd been paid to sweep the floor. The dancers hated it. They said it watched their feet. So Ezra set it on the cellar step under a bare bulb, and every night at the last waltz he'd go down the stairs and tell it the tunes were ending. Nobody knew that. Not even the band.

When the Palais came down in 1958, the men clearing the cellar found the crate lining stuck with pressed blossoms, pink and dry as paper. I carried the head down to the harbour wall myself and set it on the stone where the tide comes up. By morning a lotus had opened in the gutter beside it, and nobody in Hull has ever said how.