Full back tattoo in Japanese style showing a warrior figure among cherry blossoms and clouds, in mixed red, orange, cream and grey ink, on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full back Japanese warrior and cherry blossom

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large full back piece shows a stern warrior figure with dark hair, partly framed by cherry blossom branches, clouds and a red seal-like panel. The linework is bold and outlined, with smooth grey shading and flat areas of red, orange, cream and green. The design fills the back edge to edge, with the figure running down the centre and blossoms and clouds filling the surrounding space.

Japanese Botanical Back Warrior Figure Cherry blossom Cloud Flower Leaf

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

You are the night porter at Hollowmere Junction, the only one awake when the last milk train grinds in with its lamps unlit. The platform smells of wet coal and the sweet tobacco from the tea stall, which has been shuttered since March. Nobody gets off at this hour. Tonight a woman in a grey travelling coat steps down with a lacquer box tied in red cord and asks for the stationmaster by a name that was retired twenty years ago.

Keep reading

You tell her he is dead. She says she knows, and that she has come to collect the seal he kept for her family. You lead her to the back office, where the ledger lies open under a paperweight shaped like a crane. The seal is a square of red stone carved with a crouching hawk, and the ink pad beside it has dried to a crust. You wet it with the kettle water, the way he taught you, and press it to a blank timetable sheet. The impression comes out clean: a bird inside a wreath of petals.

Outside, the first grey light reaches the cherry trees the railway planted along the cutting in 1911, the ones nobody has pruned properly since. Petals drift down onto the rails. The woman watches them settle on the cold steel and says her grandfather used to stamp every departure this way, so no passenger boarded without the mark of the house that sent them. You understand then that the ledger is not a timetable at all. It is a list of people he sent away, each one sealed.

You find his name at the foot of the page, and beneath it, in your own hand, a line you do not remember writing: one passenger, grey coat, 5:40. The woman takes the box, bows once, and walks onto the platform without looking back. You stamp the next sheet with the hawk and wait for the petals to finish falling.