Colour traditional tattoo of a geisha with a half-skull face and flower hair pins on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha and skull portrait on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A geisha with black hair decorated by yellow flowers, hair pins and a ribbon-like shape fills the back of the hand. One side of her face is shaded as a skull with exposed teeth, and the other side has pale skin, dark eyes and red cheek tones. The bold black outlines and flat areas of red, yellow, green and pink give the piece a classic, bright look.

Traditional Japanese Hand Geisha Skull Flower Ribbon Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The name badges had been printed in a font that made everyone look like a dentist, and Shona Ferris stood at the trestle table for a full minute before she found her own. Someone had written Shona in capitals and added a small pencilled star, as if the organisers had been warned she might be difficult. Behind her the disco lights swept over the parquet of the Miners' Welfare, and the smell of sausage rolls drifted through the kitchen hatch.

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Kath Doyle came in at quarter past eight with yellow chrysanthemums wrapped in the Evening Post and a fistful of black hair pins she had clearly forgotten to take out. They had sat side by side in Mrs Pilling's home economics room for two years, sharing one pair of scissors and a grudge about who had ruined the Victoria sponge. Kath had always known what to do with her hands, and she still did. She offered Shona a mint, then pressed something small and folded into her palm.

The ribbon was blue satin gone the colour of a bruise, and it still smelt faintly of the lavender talc Shona's nan kept in a drawer. She had lent it to Kath for the summer fair in 1991, when Kath's hair had refused to stay up for the tombola. Thirty-odd years later it was pressed flat as a pressed flower in a hymn book.

'You kept it,' Shona said. Kath shrugged, and the pins caught the light. 'Never got round to giving it back.' Shona tied the ribbon around the stems of the chrysanthemums, carried them to the table by the door, and under her own name on the badge, in her smallest handwriting, wrote the word Here.