Large Japanese-style back tattoo of a geisha with pink flowers in her hair, a red and green serpent, waves and chrysanthemums, shown across a person's upper back.

Geisha and serpent back piece

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A geisha with pink flowers and a hair ornament is shown in three-quarter profile, surrounded by a red and green serpent, stylised waves and white chrysanthemums. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth and layered, with grey wash in the background and water. Bright red, pink, green and teal ink is used on the figure and creature, with the composition filling the whole upper back and reaching onto the shoulder.

Japanese Back Geisha Serpent Wave Chrysanthemum Flower Hair ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's nearly out and the tide won't wait for anybody's bones. You want the story of Kiku of the Tea Lanes, who sang to the sea because nobody else would. Her house stood above the harbour at Hanaura, where the fishing boats went out in the grey and came back, some of them, by the lantern rope.

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The sea in those years was owned by a serpent. Green as weed in the shallows and red-finned at the throat, it rose under the breakwater each autumn and took one boat for every moon it wanted. The fishermen's wives burned incense and wept and got nothing for it. Kiku went down to the black rocks with a tortoiseshell comb and a pink silk ribbon wound through her hair, and she sang the old song about the chrysanthemum that grows in salt, because her mother had sung it to her and it was the only thing the sea had not yet taken.

The serpent came up slow, waves folding off its back like paper screens. It had heard singing before, but never from someone who was not afraid. It asked her what she wanted. She said nothing for herself, only the boats, so it asked what she would give. She unpinned the carved fan from her hair and dropped it into the foam. The creature swallowed it whole, and the swell went as flat as a rice paddy.

The boats came home that winter, every one. In spring, white chrysanthemums grew along the breakwater where no one had planted them, and the old men say that if you stand on the rocks at dusk you can see a red gleam under the water, turning slowly, keeping its word. Kiku wore her hair bare after that. The sea, which keeps poor accounts, never once asked her for anything else.