Colour Japanese style tattoo of a folding fan with cherry blossoms, falling petals and black characters on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fan and cherry blossom on upper back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A folding fan painted with a blossoming branch sits at the centre of the design, framed by red cherry blossoms with yellow centres and loose falling petals. Black characters run down the left side, and the fan ribs and branch are outlined in dark linework. Warm orange and red tones dominate the colour, set against the skin of the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Japanese Back Fan Cherry blossom Petal Branch Flower Character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mitsu had been told three times that the cherry branch must lean left, away from the fold, or the blossoms would crowd into the ribs and look like a rash. She painted it leaning right anyway, because the lacquer would not wait and the master had gone down to the river to argue with a boatman about rent.

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The paper was thin as a moth's wing and took the ink like breath on cold glass. She worked ochre at the edges, the late-sunset colour her mother used for dyeing silk, then a rust red where the sky should begin to darken. Beyond the shutters the wind kept lifting petals off the temple trees and dropping them into the lane, where children chased them down to the gate and lost them in the ditch.

When the master came back wet to the knees, he held the fan up to the lamp and said nothing for a long while. Then he touched one small pink flower near the tip of the branch. "That one is falling," he said. "You painted it falling before you had decided to." He did not tell her to change it.

The fan went to a lady in the east quarter who wanted it for a poem contest. Mitsu had spoiled the reverse with a drip of red, so the master turned it over and, without asking, wrote her name in the margin in his own careful hand. It was the first time a name from the workshop had gone on a fan. She stood in the lane for a while afterwards, watching the petals come down and not bothering to catch any.