White chalk-style kanji character above the lowercase word pain on a black background, drawn as a possible tattoo design.

Chalk kanji with the word pain

Black and grey · Flash

A large Japanese kanji character is drawn in rough white chalk strokes on a black background, with the lowercase English word pain written beneath it in thinner lines. The brushy, textured linework shows uneven strokes and fading at the edges. The image is monochrome and centred, with no skin or body visible.

Kanji Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blackboard went up the stairs of the Hollin Lane Methodist hall the week the school closed, carried by two men who swore at the banister all the way. Nobody else wanted it. Ada Pike borrowed a trolley from the chapel and wheeled it home, and it leaned against her kitchen wall for eleven years, collecting steam from the kettle and crumbs from her toast.

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Her husband had brought back a Japanese dictionary from the Liverpool docks the year before he died, a fat thing with a cracked spine that he never once opened. After the funeral she took it down and began to learn. Each night she chose one character and copied it onto the slate with a stub of white chalk, rough and wide, the way she imagined a sailor's hand would move. She never knew how to say most of them. She only wanted to see them stand up straight on the black.

The one she chose on the last Tuesday in March had a sick-room radical down its left side, and she looked at the hooked strokes for a long time before she found the English gloss in pencil in the margin: pain. She stood there with chalk dust on her cardigan. Then she wrote the word beneath it, small, in her own careful hand, so it would not be mistaken for a lesson.

On Wednesday the grocer's boy came in for the coal money and stopped in the doorway. He looked at the board, then at her. 'That's a lot of hard words,' he said. Ada took a damp cloth and wiped the top corner clean, then the next, until only the thin letters at the bottom remained. 'Not so hard,' she said. 'It only wants saying out loud now and then.'