Sepia drawing of a geisha with hair sticks and closed eyes, with a dragon and wave design and a patterned sleeve, in a Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha and dragon tattoo design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a woman with an updo, two hair sticks and closed eyes, with bare shoulders. A dragon curls across her upper arm and chest, and a wave and flower sit below it, with a dense patterned sleeve on the other arm. The linework is fine and detailed, shaded in brown and grey tones on a textured parchment-coloured background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You climb the iron stairs at four with the oil can in one hand and the matches in your coat, because the glass has gone dull again and the lamp will not be seen past the Skerry if you let it. Mrs Haddow at the mainland post has been asking after the boat that did not come on Tuesday. You do not answer her. The sea below the rock has been high for a week, and when it comes in it does not roll the way ordinary water rolls. It lifts in a long dark curl, and the white on its crest looks like the scales of something that has decided to stay.

Keep reading

The first time you saw it was from the gallery, the spring your brother was lost. A wave stood up off the Skerry in the shape of a neck, then a shoulder, then a long head with its mouth open to the wind, and it hung there, with the lamp turning behind you, until the beam swept across and it sank back shining. Nobody on the mainland believed you. Your father used to say the sea keeps what it is given, and you had given it nothing but a pair of boots and a mother who stopped setting a place at supper.

Tonight the swell comes in again, rising slow and deliberate, and you see the coil of it in the spume, a pale flower of foam opening on the crest like a camellia blown off the cliff garden. You do not reach for the rail. You lift the shutter by hand, as your father did, and let the beam fall full on the water. The wave stops. For a moment it holds the shape of a raised arm, then of nothing but water, breaking white against the rock where it belongs.

In the morning the boat is in the cove, bottom up, and beside it on the shingle lies a single hair stick of black lacquer, its tip cracked, as though something had combed its way home through the water and left you the one thing it could carry. You pocket it. In the log you write: wind south-westerly, visibility good, all lamps lit, nothing to report.

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