Black and grey Japanese full back tattoo of a lion dog, tiger, clouds and lotus flowers, with a cicada on the upper arm.

Full back Japanese lion dog and tiger piece

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large full back piece shows a lion dog with a flowing mane above a figure seated on a tiger, surrounded by swirling clouds, waves and lotus flowers. The work uses bold black outlines, dense solid black areas and fine grey shading to give depth and contrast across the whole back. A cicada sits on the upper arm, and the composition fills the back from shoulder to lower back with the subject centred.

Japanese Back Upper arm Forearm Tiger Figure Cloud Lotus Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past three the lift on Ward Nine stops between floors, and you stand in the dark with a tray of unlabelled specimen pots and a torch that flickers when you tap it. The lion dog on the hoarding outside the old chapel has been there since the building was a convent, its stone mouth open and one paw resting on a ball. You have walked past it every night for six months and never once thought it had a job.

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The lift doors ease apart on their own. Beyond them the corridor is lit the colour of weak tea, and somewhere a trolley wheel squeaks in a rhythm like breathing. A striped tiger is padding along the linoleum beside the linen cupboard, slow and unbothered, and a woman in a green cardigan sits astride it with her hands folded in her lap as though she is waiting for a bus. Grey clouds curl in at the edges of the corridor, and at the far end the waves of a sea you cannot see rise up under the fire doors.

"Bed fourteen," she says, not unkindly. "Mr Okafor has been pressing his buzzer for an hour. He thinks it's his wife." You wonder how she knows his name, and then you understand that the tiger has been carrying names all night, from one bed to the next, the way the cicada on the window ledge left its papery shell behind in July, still clinging to the glass as if it had been listening.

You go. Bed fourteen is quiet when you reach it, the old man asleep with his mouth open, and on the sill sits a cicada husk the colour of old parchment. You press the buzzer once for the nurse, and when you look back the corridor is ordinary again, the lift shut, the chapel lion dog keeping its ball. Only the lino by the linen cupboard is damp, as if something large has just stepped off it.