Full back tattoo of geisha portraits and pink cherry blossom branches in a Japanese style, shaded in grey across the back.

Geisha and cherry blossom back piece

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows several geisha faces with elaborate hair ornaments, set among folding fans and a painted panel. Pink cherry blossom branches run through the design, with a small character on the left. The soft grey shading and fine detail on the faces contrast with the pink blossoms, and the composition fills the whole back.

Japanese Back Geisha Cherry blossom Fan Hair ornament Branch Kimono Woman Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hana had been told twice that the blossom was wrong. The publisher's man held the proof up to the window at the Tenjin Street shop, squinting at the pink that bled past the key block into the margins. "Cherry is not peach," he said. "Peach sells in spring. Cherry sells in autumn, to men who want to remember spring." She took the proof back and said nothing, because her uncle carved the blocks, her father had been dead three winters, and a girl who talks back does not get her name on the colophon.

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That night she sat under the lamp with the wooden blocks laid out like a row of closed fans. Each held a woman's face: a chin tilted to the left, a painted eyelid, a comb of tortoiseshell that had taken her uncle a week to cut. She had carved none of them, but she knew every line anyway. She ground safflower cake with rice water and brushed a single branch onto a spare sheet, letting the grey of the face block show through the petals so the blossom looked pressed between the pages of the same book.

In the morning the publisher found the sheet on the bench and held it to the window again. He said nothing for a long time. Then he folded it once and slid it inside his coat. "Send me the next one," he said, "and bring the fan women with you. The sailors buy them to take to the ports, and the ports like faces that look away." Hana understood she had been paid a compliment and an insult in the same breath.

The sheet went south on a rice boat three weeks later, wrapped in oilcloth beside the good paper. Hana never learned where it ended. Her uncle claimed it was pasted inside the lid of a sea chest somewhere past the islands, where the pink had browned a little each year, and where nobody thought to ask why the woman beside the branch was looking so carefully at it.