Colour realism tattoo of a geisha with a parasol and flowers in her hair, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geisha with parasol on a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A geisha with dark hair pinned up and decorated with pale flowers, looking down with closed eyes and red lips. A large parasol with fine ribs sits on the left, and the figure is set against a soft cream and peach background. The shading is smooth and painterly, with warm reds, oranges and yellows alongside black for the hair and details.

Realism Japanese Calf Geisha Woman Flower Hair ornament Kimono Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Pavilion's sprung floor took the weight of a hundred dancers on Saturdays, but on the Thursday the troupe arrived it was Mrs Okada's silk parasol that everybody wanted to touch. I was nineteen and paid a shilling a night to mind the cloakroom, which meant I was the one who got to hold it while she changed. Its ribs were fine as piano wire, and the paper had been painted with a single cream-coloured bird that seemed to lift whenever you tilted it.

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She let me help pin her hair that first week, pale paper blossoms tucked above each ear, and she taught me to close my eyes when the band struck up so the music arrived before the steps did. Her English was thin but her hands were not. On the Friday the wind came in off the bay and one rib snapped clean through, and she sat on the cloakroom bench looking at it the way my mother looked at a burnt pan.

I had a tin of fishing line and a steady hand from mending nets for my uncle. We spent the afternoon with the parasol open across our knees, splicing the rib with thread and saying almost nothing. When it was done the bird was still there, a little crooked, and she turned it slowly in the light and nodded once.

On the last night she went out onto the promenade with it raised, though the rain had not stopped, and she held it over my head while the lights of the tram sheds blurred behind us. Now you, she said, and gave me the handle. I still have it. The bird faces the wrong way, but it has never once let the rain in.