Colour Japanese sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with orange flames, a pink flower, a purple bloom and green scales.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese flames and flowers on an upper arm sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a full arm sleeve on the upper arm and shoulder, set against a pale wall and cabinet. Bold orange flames curl across the upper arm, with a pink five-petalled flower and a purple bloom with dark outlines beside it. Green and blue scales and further flame shapes fill the lower part of the sleeve, and fine black and grey linework on the back of the shoulder is partly visible.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Flame Flower Bloom Scale Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud found the scorch on the third night, when the lamp had gone yellow and the hem had given up its secrets one thread at a time. It ran up from the bottom of the silk in a licked orange edge, lapping at the sleeve, and beside it a single pink camellia had been stitched by someone who never expected anyone to look that closely. The bride's grandmother had worn this kimono in Osaka in 1961. Nobody in the family had mentioned a fire.

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The wedding was on Saturday, in a church hall in Margate with a tin urn of tea. Ines did not want the damage hidden. She wanted it made sensible, she said, the way you make a broken plate into a bowl. Maud sat up with a magnifier and a tray of silk threads she had matched in a shop on Brick Lane, orange that looked like it was still burning at the edges, and green so deep it went almost black where the light fell away. Under the sleeve, when she turned it, a purple bloom surfaced from the lining, its outlines inked in a steady hand that had never once wobbled.

She did not unpick it. She built around it. Each flame curled out from the scorch and folded back on itself, and the scales came down the hem in overlapping rows, as if the sea had been pressed flat and told to hold still. The camellia she left alone. By Friday her fingers were blistered from the needle, and the thread smelled faintly of the sweets Ines's little cousin kept sucking in the back of the car.

On Saturday the grandmother arrived with a stick, a scowl and a handbag the colour of plums. She stopped in front of the bride, looked at the sleeve for a long time, and touched the place where the orange met the green. "Well," she said. "Somebody finally put the fire on the right side of the cloth." Maud, pretending to fix a pin, let herself breathe out.