A woman seated on a beach, seen from behind, showing a large colourful Japanese-style tattoo across her back with a peony, feathered bird and green scales.

Colourful Japanese back piece with peony and feathers

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman sits on sand with her back to the camera, wearing a black bikini, and her head is turned down so her face is not visible. The large tattoo covers much of her back and side, with a peony-like flower, feathered forms and scale-like green patterns outlined in dark linework. Bright reds, oranges, yellows and greens dominate against her skin, with soft natural light and sand and trees in the background.

Japanese Back Peony Flower Feather Bird Scale Beach Bikini

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The screen had been waiting in Mrs Hori's workshop since the spring thaw, six panels of unbleached silk, and Aiko had not yet dared to touch the brush to them. The magistrate wanted a peony on the first panel, a firebird on the second, and river carp swimming up the lower edge, all in colours a village painter could scarcely afford: vermilion ground from the cinnabar merchant, malachite from the hills, gold leaf that flaked if you breathed on it.

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She painted the peony first, layering petals the way her grandmother had taught her, until the flower seemed heavier than the silk could hold. The bird took longer. Every evening she tried a new set of feathers, and every morning they lay flat and dead on the cloth. On the ninth night, tired and cross, she stopped trying to be neat and let the brush run wild across the tail, and the red and gold ran together into flame.

The bird was gone when she woke. The top of the screen was blank, but a single petal had dropped onto the floorboards, and there were scorch marks in the shape of feathers on the second panel, where the silk had not yet dried. Under the light from the paper window, the carp along the lower edge had turned their green scales toward the room, wet and glistening, as if they had been swimming all night.

The magistrate came at noon and found the screen finished, though not as ordered. He asked where the bird was. Aiko pointed to the scorched panel and told him it had flown to the river to bathe, and that it would return when the peony opened again. He paid her in full, and she kept the petal in her sleeve for luck, which is the only sensible thing a painter can do with a bird that refuses to stay in the frame.