Black and grey pencil drawing of a geisha holding a katana with a snake coiled around it, surrounded by cherry blossoms, flames and a skull, in a Japanese style design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha with katana and snake flash

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A seated geisha holds a katana wrapped in a snake, with her kimono open at the chest and one leg bare above a garter. Cherry blossom petals, a skull set within a blossom, flames and a radiating sun fill the background and lower edge. The drawing uses fine pencil linework with soft shading and dark flame shapes, shown in black and grey on a plain background.

Japanese Geisha Snake Cherry blossom Flame Skull Sun Kimono Petal Sandal

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

Sit closer, the lamp burns cheaper when you don't stare at it. You want the one about the orchard that wouldn't die, yes? Then mind the part about the snake, because the snake was the clever one.

Keep reading

The orchard stood on Hollin Reach, the last ridge where the cherry trees had been grafted through the cold years. Its keeper was an old woman named Oshiro Vell, who carried a katana she called Mizu-Kagi, and a grey snake from the grain-works coiled itself round the hilt the way ivy climbs a gatepost. Nobody knew who had taught it to stay. The hills below were burning that summer, black tongues licking up the slopes, and the smoke was so thick the mirror-men on the high pylons could not find the sun to fix their panels.

Vell went up the ridge on the night the wind turned. Under the oldest tree she found a branch that had grown round a skull, a small bone the blossom had swallowed years back, and every petal that fell on it lay there in a neat white ring. The snake lifted its head and said, quite plainly, that the mirrors were tied off with a rope of wire, and that one clean cut would let the light down into the valley. Vell said nothing. She cut the wire, and the sun came over the rim like a dropped coin.

So when the children ask why petals still fall on Hollin Reach in deep winter, tell them the blossom remembers the bone it grew round, and that it sends its white ring down to the valley to say the fire has gone. Now bed. The lamp is out.