Five Japanese-style full back tattoo designs drawn on paper sheets, showing dragons, an oni mask, a warrior with a sword, a woman and waves in colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese back piece designs on painted sheets

Japanese · Colour · Flash

Five painted sheets show full back tattoo designs in the Japanese horimono style, each with a central figure such as a dragon, an oni demon mask, a warrior with a sword or a woman in a red kimono. Black and grey wave patterns, red maple leaves and plum blossom fill the spaces around the figures. The bold outlines are in black, and the colour is applied in red, teal, green, yellow and orange with soft shading on the cloud forms.

Japanese Dragon Warrior Sword Woman Kimono Wave Maple leaves Cloud Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Sho, Master Ryuzo has finally let me touch the red. For three years I have only ground pigment and rinsed brushes, but this week he hung five painted sheets across the back room on a line of cotton and told me to find the mistake. I searched for an hour. The oni's horns were right, the dragon's claws were right, and the maple leaves had the proper crimson edge where they meet the black. Then I saw that the warrior's blade ran against the grain of the wave, so it looked as if it were cutting the cloud rather than the water. Ryuzo laughed and said it was the first true thing I had found in this room.

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The sheets are for a buyer in Kobe who will sit for them one panel at a time, and Ryuzo says the work must hold its shape across months, not just on paper. So the wave clouds have to be shaded slowly, grey over grey, until they seem to roll behind the figures. He made me do the teal dragon's scales four times before he would let the green go in. My hand shook on the fourth, and he did not say anything, which I have learned is his way of saying it will do.

The woman in the red kimono is mine, though he signed the corner. He based her face on the girl who sells persimmons by the north gate, because she never looks up from her basket, and he wanted that stillness. I gave her a dragon coiled beneath her feet and plum blossom at her shoulder, pink on pale cream, and I spent an afternoon on a single petal that nobody will see once the piece is finished.

This morning the sheets were still tacky when the light came through the paper screens. The orange on the oni had settled into the black, and the cloud behind the dragon was still damp enough to look as if it were drifting. Ryuzo stood at the line with his hands behind his back for a long time. Then he took a brush, wrote my name in small kana beside the teal dragon, and said, Now you have to be better than this. I am writing to tell you that I am not sure I can be, and that I have never been happier to be wrong. Your sister, Tomoe