Pencil sketch of a geisha with cherry blossom, clouds and a koi fish in Japanese style, drawn on pink paper as a tattoo design.

Geisha with koi and cherry blossom sketch

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil line drawing of a geisha with an elaborate updo and hair ornaments, looking downwards, with a koi fish near her shoulder and a kimono patterned with clouds and swirls. Cherry blossom branches and stylised waves frame the figure, with a faint circle behind her head. The sketch uses single-weight grey linework with light construction lines visible, drawn on a pink sheet of paper.

Japanese Geisha Cherry blossom Koi Cloud Wave Kimono Hair ornament Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have walked this garden at the hour when the cherry branches still hold a little dark, and the koi come up beneath the stone bridge to see whether you have brought bread. Mrs Tanaka used to say they remembered faces. You never believed her, but the big orange one with the torn fin lifts its mouth toward you every morning now, and you have stopped pretending it is not for you.

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She kept the teahouse on the north side of the pond and dressed the hair of the women who came to it, pinning the silver kanzashi with a single practised turn of the wrist. The lacquered box she left you holds eleven of them, each with a little chain of plum-coloured beads and a bell that rings if you breathe too hard beside it. Above the teahouse door a painted moon sits inside a faint ring of ink, and beneath it the waves climb the wall in the same tidy curls as the sleeves of the kimono hanging on the peg.

The letter from the family came on a Tuesday. They want the house sold before the spring, the pond filled in, the box sent to a museum in Osaka that has never once written to you. You sit with the lid open and count the bells. Outside, a wind comes through the orchard and the petals fall so thickly that the water goes pale, and the koi drift down into the shadows under the bridge.

In the morning you take the smallest comb, the one with the cracked tortoiseshell, and tuck it into your own hair. You close the box and leave it on the step for whoever comes next. At the gate you look back once. The orange fish has followed the petals to the edge of the water, waiting, as if it knows the way out better than you do.