Black and grey Japanese style full back tattoo of a helmeted warrior, swirling clouds and a tiger, with a peony on the upper arm.

Full back warrior and tiger piece

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A full back tattoo shows a helmeted warrior figure holding a sword, surrounded by swirling clouds and patterned armour. A snarling tiger sits in the lower half of the back, and a peony is partly visible on the upper arm. The shading is in black and grey wash with fine detail in the faces and armour, and the composition fills the whole back from shoulder to waistband.

Japanese Back Upper arm Warrior Helmet Sword Tiger Cloud Armour Peony

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire will only keep its manners for another hour, and I'll not shout the rest over the wind. You want the general of Sennet Vale, the one they painted on the city gates? Then you must hear about the tiger first, because the tiger was lying in that ravine long before the general came up the Silver Pass with his lacquered helmet and his patterned armour.

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His name was Ruen Harsk, and he was not a kind man, but he was a fair one, which in a border captain is rarer than gold. The caravans from the salt marshes had to cross the pass, and every spring the mountain sent down its clouds and every spring the caravans came apart in the mist. Ruen went down to the ravine alone with his sword across his back. He found the tiger there, grey as old ash, with a cub tucked under one paw and a peony blooming from a crack in the rock beside her. He sat with her until the fog lifted. Nobody knows what they said to each other. My grandmother swore the tiger spoke in the voice of a midwife, and that Ruen answered in the voice of a boy who had just been told his mother was dead.

What they agreed was this. He would hold the pass and cut down any thief or soldier who tried to cross it without paying, and she would keep the mist in the high valley where it belonged. For thirty winters it held. Then the Duke of the lowlands sent four hundred men to take the pass for himself, and the mist came down so thick that the Duke's men walked off the edge in their own confusion. Ruen stood alone at the top of the path with the sword raised, and the tiger stood at his back, and neither of them moved until the sun came up over the marsh.

When the mist finally cleared, Ruen was gone, and so was the tiger. Only the helmet remained on the flat stone, with a single peony petal caught in its horns. The caravans still cross the Silver Pass. The peony grows there every spring, and the drivers snap off a bloom for luck and tuck it under their hats. Mind the mist, my friend. Sometimes it is only fog, and sometimes it is a tiger keeping her promise.