Full back Japanese-style tattoo in bright colour showing a woman in a kimono, a tiger, butterflies, a leopard, koi fish and cherry blossom across the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full back Japanese tattoo with tiger and koi

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare back is covered by a large colour tattoo of a woman in a patterned kimono, with a tiger on the red fabric near the shoulder and a leopard, koi fish and butterflies lower down. Flowers and a dark ornamental bow sit at the top, with cherry blossom and foliage filling the gaps. Bold outlines and saturated red, green, orange and purple create a dense, edge-to-edge composition.

Japanese Back Woman Kimono Tiger Leopard Butterfly Cherry blossom Flower Bow Foliage

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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

Pull your chair nearer the stove, the last northbound won't be in until the bell rings twice, and I have never told this one to anybody wearing a hat. Hanakawa station had a ticket clerk called Teru who kept his grandmother's kimono folded in the lost-property cupboard. Green silk, stitched with butterflies, and a red sash that caught the lamplight like a tiger's back. Each spring the cherry blossom blew through the open windows and settled on his ledgers, and he swept it out without a word of complaint.

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One March a woman stepped off the late train carrying a paper lantern painted with a koi, a black ribbon knotted at her collar and a leopard-spotted shawl over one arm. She asked for a ticket to the sea. The sea line had closed in the war, and Teru told her so, but she only smiled and asked him to look again. When he looked, the timetable had a new line printed in faded ink: one carriage, departing when the passenger is ready. She laughed at his face, laid the shawl on the bench, and walked out past the pond where the koi rose under the blossom.

Teru followed with the lantern in his hands, because someone had to carry it. The pond was black and still, but the fish came up gold and orange, turning slow circles around the light, and the petals drifted down to cover the water like a second kimono. The woman was gone. Only her ribbon lay on the stone edge, unravelled into a long dark line that ran back toward the platform. He wound it round his wrist and went to bed.

In the morning the cupboard held the green silk alone, hung on its peg with the butterflies gone from the cloth, and the timetable still said one carriage. Teru never found the sea line, but he never swept the blossom off the platform again.