Full sleeve Japanese-style tattoo in colour showing cranes flying through clouds, a purple mountain, pine trees and turquoise waves, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese landscape full sleeve with cranes and waves

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two views of the same arm show a full sleeve tattoo of a Japanese-style landscape. White cranes fly through grey and white clouds above a purple, snow-capped mountain, with green hills, pine trees and turquoise waves across the lower forearm. The linework is bold and the shading is soft, with colour ink dominating against a dark background.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Crane Bird Cloud Mountain Pine tree Wave Hill Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edie had been up the ladder since six, and the purple on the mountain still wouldn't sit right. Mr Pryce wanted the backdrop finished by Saturday, when the Starlight Ballroom reopened with a band from Leeds, and he had stood below her turning his hat in his hands, saying it needed to look restful and foreign, like a picture on a tea caddy. She mixed another spoon of ultramarine into the lilac and tried again along the snowline, where the paint kept drying too pale.

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Her father had painted the sea for the fairground boats before the war, and it was his wave she copied across the bottom of the cloth, the curl and white spit of it, turquoise shading to green where the light would catch. The cranes were harder. She had only a library book with a grainy plate of a bird in full stretch, so she gave them more wing than seemed sensible, three of them rising out of grey cloud as if the cloud were pushing them up.

On Saturday she hid behind the proscenium with a cold cup of tea and watched the floor fill. Couples turned under the purple peak while the pines bent in the light from the chandeliers. A cornet player with a cracked lip leaned over the rail and asked why all the birds were flying the same way.

"They're leaving before the lights come up," she said, and he laughed as though she had made a joke.

At closing, with the floor empty and the chairs stacked on their sides, she looked up and saw that the highest crane, the one she had painted last and worst, had caught the lamplight and seemed, for a moment, to be turning back.