Back and arm tattoo in Japanese style showing a fierce warrior with a sword, a koi on the upper arm and peonies, in colour against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese back and arm sleeve tattoo

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large full-back and sleeve tattoo shows a fierce warrior figure with a sword, surrounded by clouds, waves, peony blooms and a koi carp on the arm. Solid black shading fills the background areas, with bold outlines and fine detail in the scales and foliage. Vivid reds, greens, pinks and blues dominate the composition, with the koi and peonies wrapping around the upper arm towards the fist.

Japanese Back Upper arm Warrior Sword Koi Peony Wave Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate arrives at Tilbury at ten past two, and by three you have decided it is the most honest thing on the manifest. The paperwork says ceramic tiles, rolled and packed in tissue, sent from a dealer in Osaka to a gallery in Margate. You lift the lid with the blade of a box cutter and the smell is camphor and old paper, not clay.

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Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is a hanging scroll as long as your arm. A warrior stands in a storm of cloud with his sword raised, his brows drawn so hard they look like weather. Below him the sea heaves in blue and black, and a red-gold carp throws itself up through the crest of a wave as though the water were a ladder it had decided to climb. Peonies line the margin, pink as a scald.

Dell, your supervisor, wants the thing stamped and cleared before the shift changes. You read the customs note twice and find nothing about a sword. You fold the oilcloth back over the warrior's face and ring the gallery, and a woman with a smoker's voice tells you the scroll came from a man whose grandfather carried it off a ship in 1946, and that it was never meant to leave the country without a fish riding the wave beside it.

The stamp goes down at twenty to five. Dell goes home. Before you roll the scroll you look once more at the carp, its gold scales laid in tidy rows, and notice that the wave beneath its belly sits on a small square of newer paper, a label reading Hold until called for. You peel it back. Underneath, in faded ink, is a second fish, smaller and black, turning the other way. You roll the warrior up with his sword, tie the cord, and leave the carp facing the door.