Large Japanese-style back tattoo of a geisha in a circle, surrounded by cherry blossom branches, a red sun, a mountain, a folding fan and kanji.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha and cherry blossom back piece

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A full back tattoo shows a geisha portrait inside a dark circle, framed by outlined cherry blossom branches. A red sun sits above a line-drawn mountain, with two kanji characters on the left and a folding fan with ribbons at the lower centre. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading on the face and fan and small areas of red and pink colour.

Japanese Botanical Back Geisha Cherry blossom Mountain Fan Kanji Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fan lived in the tea house drawer from March until the petals were swept, because my mother said a fan should only be opened when there was something to cool. Every spring the cherry on the north terrace bloomed all at once, as if someone had called it, and within a fortnight the pink lay in the moss like spilt rice. I raked it into the koi pond each morning. Hana-san said the carp grew sweeter on blossom, and I was too young to doubt her.

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The summer I turned sixteen, a man from the prefectural office came up the lane with a measuring wheel and a rolled map. He wanted the road widened past our gate, and the cherry stood exactly where the bend would go. Grandfather walked him to the edge of the terrace and pointed at the mountain, grey under a sky the colour of rice paper, with the red sun already sitting above its shoulder. He said the mountain had been burning under the earth for a thousand years and nobody had moved it yet. The surveyor laughed, wrote something in his book, and went back down the lane.

That evening I carried the fan out and opened it slowly, the black silk ribbon trailing from its guard like a river. I tied the ribbon around the lowest branch, where the bark was smooth and the bud-heavy twigs hung close to the ground. Then I waited for the last petals to come down onto it, pink on black, until the knot was heavy with them. In the morning the surveyor's stakes were still in the lane, but nobody came back to pull them up, and the tree kept the ribbon.