Black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a geisha holding a parasol on the upper back of a woman with her hair pinned up.

Geisha with parasol on upper back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her hair pinned up, showing a tattoo of a geisha holding an open parasol on her upper back. The geisha's kimono has a floral pattern, and the parasol's ribs are drawn in fine black lines. The tattoo is rendered in black ink and grey shading against a warm, softly lit background.

Japanese Back Geisha Umbrella Kimono Floral pattern Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had not stopped for nine days when Oyuki came up the hill to the parasol maker's house with a bundle of silk under her arm. The old man was already sitting among his bamboo ribs, scraping each one smooth with a blade no longer than his hand, and he did not look up when she set the bundle beside him.

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Her mistress kept the tea house by the river and had asked for one thing only. The parasol must open in the wet and stay open in a gale, and it must carry a woman who could walk through the rain without spoiling her hem. Oyuki had brought the peony and cloud pattern on dark cloth, and asked the maker to draw the face himself, since he was the only one in the town who could make a face look as though it were listening.

He worked through the night with a brush dipped in soot and water. He set twenty-four ribs into the crown with a turn of red thread, and the lines ran outward like the spokes of a cart wheel left to rot in a field. By the time the lamp guttered, the woman under the silk had her chin lifted and her eyes half closed, as if someone had called her name from the far end of the street. Oyuki carried it down the hill at dawn, and not one drop reached the paper.

Her mistress opened it at the water gate and stood a long while without speaking. Then she turned it slowly in her hands and frowned at the bare silk above the woman's head. 'Paint the rain on her too,' she said at last. 'She ought to have a reason to hold it up.' So the maker did, a fine grey scatter of drops across the cloth, and that evening the woman by the river carried the parasol out into the storm and laughed at it.