Flash design of a geisha with a red peony in her hair above a skull wearing a samurai helmet, in a Japanese style with grey shading and red accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha and skull in samurai helmet

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

The design shows a geisha's face in profile with red lips and a red peony in her hair, set above a skull in a samurai helmet with red eye sockets and a red-tinged jaw. Cherry blossom petals, a folding fan and a horned mask fill the surrounding space, with smooth grey shading and fine hatched detail on the armour. The artwork is mostly black and grey, with red used for the flowers, petals and skull accents.

Japanese Geisha Skull Peony Cherry blossom Fan Petal Mask

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The box comes off the 9.14 with a luggage label tied to its handle, and nobody but you is awake to read it. Inside, under tissue gone the colour of weak tea, there is a folding fan with black ribs, a peony cut from red silk and wired at the stem, and a helmet of blackened tin with a grin pressed into its brow. The label says only: Keep until someone asks for these by name. You put the box on the shelf behind the ticket machine, between the Thermos and the tide tables, and you tell yourself nobody will ask.

Keep reading

Nobody does, for eleven weeks. Rain comes sideways across the platform and the signal lamps hum. You learn to hear the 22.40 before you see it, and you learn that the lost property does not care whether you are lonely. Then, on a Thursday, a girl in a wet anorak stands at the hatch and says, 'Is there a fan? My nan said there'd be a fan.' She says it so flatly you almost miss the tremor underneath.

You open the box. She lifts the fan out and it springs open with a clean, dry crack, the paper gone soft but the painted blossom still pink at the edges. The peony rolls off the counter. A freight train thunders through on the far road, and the wind it drives along the platform catches the petals still caught in the tissue and scatters them across the wet concrete like a spill of red coins.

She doesn't cry. She crouches, picks up one petal and holds it to the lamplight as if checking a ticket. 'She always said the trains would take anything,' she says. You hand her the helmet too, and she laughs, and the sound is the first warm thing you have heard all winter. By the time you have swept the rest into the drain, the last train has gone, the fan is folded in her coat pocket, and the label on the empty box has a name written beneath your own, in a hand that is not yours.