Back of a woman showing a colourful Japanese style back piece of cherry blossom and flowers, with a green snake sleeve on the arm and a woman portrait tattoo on the upper arm.

Japanese back piece with cherry blossom and arm sleeve

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a large back piece with cherry blossom branches, peony-like flowers and a bird among swirling clouds. The linework is bold with soft shading, and the palette of pinks, reds, greens and yellows is vivid. The composition fills the frame, with a full green and red sleeve on the left arm, a black tribal design on the shoulder and a portrait figure with a jewelled headdress on the upper arm.

Japanese Back Upper arm Shoulder Forearm Cherry blossom Flower Peony Bird Cloud Snake Tribal Back piece Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okada had kept the lost property cupboard at Hanamura station for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had come back for a folded silk fan painted with a crane. The petals came down early that April, drifting across the platform like something spilled. He dusted the fan each morning anyway, because the paint still looked damp where a blossom branch crossed a bank of grey cloud.

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On the third Tuesday a girl in a school blazer climbed off the 7:14 with a sketchbook and asked whether anyone had handed in a fan. She had drawn the same crane on her own page, badly, and said her grandmother had painted the original on the back of a wedding gift. Okada did not ask why a fan should be on a train at all. He handed it over, and she opened it beneath the station clock, and the crane's wings caught the light from the ticket office window.

She told him her grandmother had painted the whole border of cloud the year the line first opened, and that the bird was meant to lift out of the paper and cross the valley to the sea. Okada admitted that as a boy he had tried to copy a bird like that onto his school exercise book, and his version had come out looking like a snake. She laughed, then studied the fan for a long time without speaking.

She left it with him. He should keep it, she said, for whoever came next. He hung it in the window where the blossom blew in, and by the end of the week petals had settled in the folds of its painted clouds, pink on pink, as if the paper had been waiting for them.