Side view of a man's arm covered by a colourful Japanese style full sleeve tattoo featuring a fierce figure, a moon and foliage on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese full sleeve with warrior figure

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a full sleeve tattoo on a man's upper arm and shoulder, viewed from the side against a black background. The central subject is a fierce figure with a moon behind it, surrounded by leaves, swirling forms and a netted or scaled pattern that wraps down the arm. The work is bold and colourful, with red, yellow, blue and green ink, and the design fills the arm to create a continuous composition.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Warrior Figure Moon Leaves Scale Foliage Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamps on the Hollin Bridge had gone out by the time Matsu came down to the water with his net over one shoulder. Nobody in the lower quarter fished after the bells, because the river after the bells belonged to the drowned and to the men who had drowned them. Matsu fished anyway. His wife was sick and the rice merchant wanted paying.

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He cast into the black water where the moon lay broken on the surface. The net came up heavy and full of leaves, red maple and yellow ginkgo that had no business in a river in midwinter, and tangled through the mesh was a man in armour. The man's face was angry, his hair tied high, and he held a sword in one hand and a white disc in the other, as if he were keeping the moon from falling.

"Put me back and I will give you what you came for," the warrior said, plainly, the way a clerk reads out a bill. Matsu asked what that was. The warrior said the river had taken his name and he wanted it returned, and that the rice merchant owed the quarter forty years of water. Matsu cut the net. The warrior rose, river scales clinging to him like coins, and walked up the steps toward the sleeping houses, leaving the moon in Matsu's palm, warm as a coin fresh from a purse.

Next morning the rice merchant's warehouse stood open to the river with its ledgers floating. Matsu's wife was sitting up and asking for tea. The moon in his palm had gone cold, and he kept it in his pocket, and the net, when he hung it to dry, was woven now with threads of gold and red that had not been there before.