Black line drawing of a horned Hannya mask with prayer beads, smoke swirls and a coiled dragon, a Japanese style tattoo flash design.

Hannya mask with horns and prayer beads

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a horned Hannya demon mask with bared fangs, flanked by a string of prayer beads with a tassel and a small fan-like element at the top. Smoke or cloud swirls and a clawed dragon or serpent form run around and below the mask, enclosed in a loose oval outline. The drawing uses clean, even black linework with some hatching on the horns and hair, and no colour or shading is applied.

Japanese Horn Smoke Dragon Serpent Demon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Inspector Margit Halloran had checked papers at the Velen crossing for nineteen years, and she could usually tell a lie by the way a man held his coffee. The grey lorry from the east had its paperwork in order, but the driver kept glancing at the trailer's back doors as though something inside might knock.

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She opened them herself. There were crates of tea, a pallet of glazed tiles, and at the back, wrapped in a linen cloth, a wooden mask. It had a long, drawn jaw and two curved horns, lacquered the red of old brick, with teeth bared in a grin that was not quite a smile. A string of prayer beads hung from its neck, the wood worn pale where a hand had held them. A tassel of dried cord swung from the lowest bead like a pendulum.

"It's for a temple in the city," the driver said. "The priest asked for it back. Said his grandmother promised it to the river years ago and he'd been meaning to make good." Margit didn't laugh. She turned the mask over. On the inside someone had scratched a date, a name that wasn't the driver's, and a smaller word in a script she didn't know.

She wrote "religious artefact, no duty" on the form and stamped it. As the lorry pulled away she saw the driver cross himself in the wing mirror, and realised she had been holding her breath. Behind her the barrier rose, and somewhere in the cab the beads kept clicking, slow as a counted prayer.