Large realistic-style geisha tattoo with a parasol and red kimono details, covering the upper back.

Geisha with parasol across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A geisha with her eyes lowered stands beside a large open parasol, with her hands held together at the front of a kimono. The figure is shaded in soft greys with a sharp, detailed outline, and the hair ornaments are picked out in pink. Red accents on the obi, collar and kimono pattern stand out against the otherwise grey tones, and the image fills the upper back.

Japanese Realism Back Geisha Kimono Hair ornament Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry horn sounds twice before you have tied the last rib, and Mrs Hayashi is already at the harbour steps with her trunk, asking whether the parasol will be dry by the time the mist lifts. On Tsukishima nothing dries quickly. The washi takes the sea air like a sponge, and for three days you have waited for the paper to stop sweating grey.

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She wants red. Her mother's parasol was red on the outside, she says. You tell her the lacquer on the outer face has already set, and she laughs, the first time you have heard her laugh in the six weeks she has climbed the stairs above the fish market. The ferry takes her across to a teahouse in Osaka, where she will be called by a name that is not hers, and she has agreed to wear pink combs that pinch at her hair. Leave the canopy undyed, she asks, the colour of fog. Paint only the underside red, where the light lands on whoever holds it.

You do it. You work vermilion into the shadow of each rib with a brush no wider than a grain of rice, while the bell goes again and the gulls pull at the nets below. When she takes the parasol from your hands and opens it at the top of the steps, the grey canopy turns the whole morning the colour of the inside of a shell, and the ferry pulls away with her standing under it, the red hidden from everyone but herself.