Black and white photo of a woman seated on sand with her back to the camera, showing a large Japanese-style floral tattoo covering her back.

Japanese floral back piece on a woman at the beach

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a bun sits on sand with her back to the camera, wearing a black halterneck bikini. Her back is covered by a large tattoo of peony or chrysanthemum-style flowers with leaves and what looks like a wave or fish form lower down, rendered in fine grey shading. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo and the sand texture making up most of the frame.

Japanese Back Woman Peony Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Back piece Bikini Beach Sand

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on the quay before the boats come in, sorting your grandmother's drawings by the weight of the paper. The harbourmaster has pinned a yellow warning to the net loft door, and the swell is already slapping the steps under the chandlery, so the gulls have given up on the bins and sit in rows along the rail, waiting for the nets.

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Her sheets are all chrysanthemums, pencilled in the back room above the salt store. Petals stacked like smoke, leaves cut sharp as rope ends, and at the bottom of every page a carp breaking a wave that she never finished. She said the fish was a promise. You never asked to whom.

The Kestrel comes round the breakwater at four, low in the water, with Tomas at the wheel and nothing in the hold but a slick of diesel and the smell of a bad season. He lifts a hand and you lift yours back, and you find the last sheet in your coat pocket, the one where the wave has nearly reached the fish. Her handwriting in the corner says: take it out past the buoy.

So you do. You wade to your knees with the page wrapped in oilcloth, unfold it on the flat of the water, and watch the grey wash lift from the paper and spread out in threads over the swell. The petals drift away from the quay in a slow grey bloom, the carp turns once, and then the tide takes the whole garden out past the buoy without you.