Black ink Japanese-style tattoo of a woman in a kimono holding a parasol, with a pagoda and blossoming branch, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha with parasol and pagoda on a leg

Japanese · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a patterned kimono sits with a parasol behind her, her face turned away and partly hidden by long hair. A pagoda roof and a branch with blossoms sit in the background to the upper right. The linework is bold and solid in black ink, with shading and fill used for the hair, the parasol ribs and the dark areas of the robe, and no colour is present. The tattoo fills most of the frame on the leg, with the skin and a plastic-covered surface visible around it.

Japanese Calf Geisha Woman Kimono Branch Blossom Cherry blossom

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

The snow had been falling since the temple bell at dusk, and by the time Keiko carried the tea tray up the back stairs the road below the inn had vanished entirely. Guests were rare in the mountain month. Only the tinsmith from Nagano remained, snoring in the room with the sticking shutter, and the widow in the east room, who had not come down since her arrival.

Keep reading

Keiko had found the parasol that morning in the storeroom, under a stack of futons that smelled of camphor. Its oiled paper had gone the colour of weak tea, and two ribs were splintered at the tip, but the painted branch across it was still legible. Her grandmother used to say the plum on the far hill blossomed the same week the first snow fell, so no one could ever be sure which had come first.

She knocked on the east room and held the parasol out through the gap in the screen. The widow took it without a word and turned it slowly, studying the ribs as though they were a letter she had been expecting. Then she slid the screen wider. Keiko saw a small lacquered box open on the floor, and inside it a heap of pressed petals, pale pink and dry as ash.

"Put it by the window," the widow said at last. She opened the parasol indoors, which was bad luck, and laughed quietly when a shower of dust fell from the ribs onto the mats. Outside, the pagoda roof had gone white under the moon. Where the snow-light caught the paper, a faint round of petals lay across the tatami, and for the length of a breath the room looked like the hillside in spring.