Full back tattoo in Japanese style showing a geisha holding fans, cherry blossoms, butterflies and wind lines in colour across the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full back Japanese piece with geisha and butterflies

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large back piece covers the whole of the upper back, centred on a figure in a patterned kimono holding two folding fans. Cherry blossom branches, several butterflies and dark wind lines radiate across a near-black background, with waves and more flowers filling the lower back. The shading is bold and smooth, and the ink is mostly in reds, greens, yellows and pinks, with a few stars and a bird visible on the right arm.

Japanese Back Upper arm Geisha Kimono Fan Butterfly Cherry blossom Flower Wave Star Bird

Find an artist for this

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 wind had swung round to the north by noon and rattled the shutters of her grandfather's shop, and Hana stood among the fans drying on every table. Bamboo ribs lay pinned to the boards like the bones of small birds. The ferry would not come again until the sea settled, and the man from the mainland who had ordered twelve fans was already two days late.

Keep reading

She had painted a geisha on the last one, a woman in a green silk kimono with waves worked along its hem, and she could not make the face come right. Her grandfather would hold it up to the lamp in the evening and say nothing, which was worse than any criticism. So she carried the fan down to the harbour wall, where the cherry trees on the hill let their petals fall onto the water, and she opened it against the wind. The gusts pushed back at the paper in long grey lines, the way they always did before a blow.

A fishing boat was coming in from the south, riding low, with a strip of red cloth knotted to its mast. Takeshi, who mended nets on the far side of the quay, shouted that the ferry had been sighted behind it. Petals drifted across the painted silk. Hana folded the fan shut and set it on the warm stones, and a small yellow-green butterfly came down from nowhere and settled on the sleeve of the geisha, its wings still.

She left it there. By the time the ferry tied up, the paint had dried around the insect, and the mainland man lifted the fan and tilted it toward the sun. The face was still blank, but the wind had found the ribs and the butterfly had stayed, so the fan looked as though the woman inside it had only just turned her head away.