Japanese style back tattoo of a hannya mask with pink cherry blossoms and swirling clouds, with tattooed sleeves visible on both arms.

Hannya mask and cherry blossoms across a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A full back piece shows a hannya demon mask with bared teeth and gold-rimmed eyes, framed by pink cherry blossom branches and pale wind-blown streaks. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with soft greys and browns on the mask and a few dark swirl motifs at the edges. The photograph is taken from behind the wearer, with a green and red sleeve partly visible on the right arm.

Japanese Back Cherry blossom Demon Cloud Swirl Wind Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the wind off the river takes my voice before it reaches the back benches, and I have never had a voice worth losing. Forty years I rode with Harrow's Travelling Marvels, and in all that time the cherry trees never once came to meet us on time. We would reach a town in the first week of April with the tent still damp from winter and find the blossom gone to brown paper, or not yet open at all, so the posters promised a pink spectacle and the crowd got sawdust.

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The last season, Harrow was dying in a caravan that smelled of liniment, and he pushed a tin trunk towards me and told me not to open it until the wind changed. Inside was a mask: a hannya, the horned woman a jealous heart turns into. Its gold-rimmed eyes had been painted by someone very patient, and its teeth were carved so finely you could see the gums. Harrow had worn it in the knife-throwing act, a wronged wife who turned at the final blade. Nobody ever paid him for it. He said it had been paid for already, by someone in another country, a long time before either of us was born.

When the wind finally swung round to the east, I put the mask on and walked out past the stalls to the orchard fence, where the branches hung low with petals that had decided, at last, to open. The crowd went quiet. Not from fear. They were waiting, as I was, to see which of us would blink first.