Colour Japanese style tattoo of a folding fan showing Mount Fuji and a red sun, surrounded by pink cherry blossom flowers and falling petals, with a pink ribbon, on the back.

Fan with Mount Fuji and cherry blossom

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a folding fan painted with a blue sky, a red sun and a dark Mount Fuji, with a pink ribbon hanging from its base. Five-petalled pink and white cherry blossoms with yellow centres and green sepals surround the fan, along with several loose petals drifting above. The linework is bold and dark, with flat, saturated colour and soft grey shading on the mountain.

Japanese Traditional Back Fan Cherry blossom Sun Ribbon Petal Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mitsuko had painted the same mountain for thirty-one years, and Teodor, who had come from Gdańsk to learn the trade, believed he knew how it was done. Fold the paper, wash the sky in cobalt before the size dried, let the snow line sit a thumb's width below the peak. He had watched her do it a hundred times above the shop on Teramachi, where the rain came sideways off the Kamo and the awning never quite kept it out.

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On the last Tuesday of October she set a blank fan on the bench without a word and pushed the pot of vermilion towards him. "The sun," she said. He dipped the brush, hesitated, and she shook her head. "Not yet. First the ribbon." He painted a pink strip hanging from the base, the way a ribbon falls from a bag of sweets, and she nodded as if he had passed a small test.

By evening the sky had dried to a streaky pale blue and the mountain stood dark against it, shaded grey where she had rubbed the ink with her thumb. Teodor asked why the sun had to wait. She looked at the fan for a long while before answering. "Because I have never once got the sun right on the first pass. I leave it blank so I have a reason to come back."

When he unlocked the shop the next morning, the fan lay drying on the rack by the window. The sun was there, a clean red disc above the peak, and a single cherry petal had stuck to the wet lacquer at its edge. Mitsuko was not in yet. He left the petal where it was.