Colour portrait tattoo of a woman with a bun and ornate black and grey floral lace headdress, shaded in a realistic style across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha portrait with floral headdress

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face and shoulders are tattooed across the upper arm, with a hair bun pinned beneath an ornate headdress of black and grey flowers and lace. The face and skin tones are softly shaded with fine, controlled linework, while the headdress and lace trim along the neckline are rendered in detailed grey tones. Warm peach and brown colour fills the skin and background of the design, and the subject is framed centrally with the arm curving across the image.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Woman Portrait Geisha Lace Hair bun Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Fenwick had been picking the same knot out of the grey silk for three evenings when the ferry horn sounded across the harbour, and she knew before she looked that it was the last boat of the week, the one that carried Mr Hollis's crates. The commission had come in March: a headdress of black lace and grey silk blossoms for a dancer at the mainland theatre, to be worn in a piece about a river spirit. Ada had never seen a geisha except in a book with the corners worn soft, but the drawing had come with a note that said only: make her look as if she is listening.

Keep reading

She worked at the window while the light lasted, pinning the lace into scallops and stitching the blossoms one petal at a time, each no larger than a fingernail. Her daughter Kirsty brought tea and stood watching the frame without speaking, the way children on Hallan stood at the edge of the water waiting for a boat to come in. "It's too heavy," Kirsty said at last. "Her neck will ache."

Ada unpicked the lowest flower and restitched it lighter, leaving a gap at the back where the pins could slide through. Then, because nobody would ever see it beneath the hair, she worked a single white thread into the lace in the shape of a small boat and tied it off with the knot her own mother had taught her.

The crates went out on Thursday. Three weeks later a programme arrived with the dancer's name in gilt, and on the page with the photograph someone had pencilled in the margin that the headdress was the lightest thing on stage. Ada propped the card against the kettle, where the harbour light could reach it, and went back to her frame to start the next one.