Black and grey Japanese style back tattoo of a geisha with chrysanthemums and wave patterns, covering most of the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha and waves across a back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a geisha with an elaborate hairstyle and ornaments, set among stylised waves, a fan and chrysanthemum flowers. The linework is bold with soft grey shading that gives depth to the hair, skin and water. The design fills the back from shoulder to waistband, with the figure set in the upper centre and the flowers and waves wrapping down the sides.

Japanese Back Geisha Woman Wave Chrysanthemum Flower Fan Hair ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the Hoshi strait took the fan out of my hand before the lacquer was dry, and I stood on the harbour wall watching it tumble toward the swell like a gull with one wing spoilt. Three days I had spent on it. Chrysanthemums in ink-grey, petals pale as dust, for the shrine where my brother's name still hangs on a plank with the others. Mother said the sea keeps what it is given. I said the sea had been given enough.

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The fan did not sink. It rode the white crests past the breakwater, folding and unfolding as the water moved it, until the tide turned and the boatmen stopped rowing to look. Old Tetsuo swore he saw it take the shape of a woman's head bent over a wave. Nobody believed him, but nobody stopped him either, and by the next market day everyone in Ko-ura was telling the story and getting the flowers wrong.

On the ninth morning it came back in with the catch, wedged in a basket of mussels, the paper soft and blue-grey with seawater. The chrysanthemums had run into the waves. The petals bled into the foam and the foam bled into the stems, so that the whole sheet looked like one long swell lifting a single flower toward the sky.

I did not mend it. I wrapped it in oiled cloth and nailed it inside the shrine door, where the wind cannot reach. Then I went back to the bench and began another, and this time I painted the water first.