Colour tattoo on the upper arm of a geisha in a blue floral kimono, eating from a bowl with chopsticks while her body is opened to reveal bloody organs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha with chopsticks and exposed organs on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman with an updo and closed eyes sits in a blue kimono with small floral patterns, holding chopsticks to a bowl while blood runs down her chest and arm. Her body is opened up, showing shaded, realistic-looking organs and intestines in red and pink tones. The design covers the full upper arm, with smooth colour transitions, strong black outlines and a dark background that makes the reds stand out.

Japanese Realism Upper arm Geisha Woman Kimono Blood Floral pattern Updo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been falling on the Tuesday market since before six, and Mrs Okonedo's silk stall under its green tarpaulin had lost three customers to the puddles. Nobody wanted the blue kimono with the cherry blossom hem. It hung from the pole like a wet flag, and Hana Sato, who had stitched it herself forty years ago in a back bedroom in Bradford, could not bring herself to take it down.

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At noon a woman came in under the awning, shaking water from a black umbrella. Her hair was pinned high and she held a paper bowl of rice, lifting each grain with lacquered chopsticks, eyes closed as though the market were a temple. She did not pay. She asked only whether the kimono was old. Hana said it was older than the market. The woman nodded, as if that were the answer she had come for, and set the empty bowl on the trestle without a sound. The chopsticks lay across it in the shape of a closed fan.

She came back the next Tuesday, and the one after. Each time the bowl was empty and the silk at her shoulders was darker than before, though Hana never saw her eat anything but rice. In the end Hana unpicked the lining, sewed a deep pocket inside the left sleeve, and said nothing about it. The woman tucked her coin purse into it, then the umbrella's spare tip, then something small wrapped in newspaper, and walked off up Kirkgate with her shoulders held easy.

On the last Tuesday of October the tarpaulin finally sagged and tipped its water onto the bolts of cloth. Hana folded the kimono, found the pocket still stitched shut, and left it that way. Some things, she had decided, were better kept than sold.