Large colour Japanese-style oni demon face tattoo covering a man's chest and stomach, with grey shading and orange, purple and teal accents.

Japanese oni demon face across chest and stomach

Japanese · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large demonic face with bared fangs, glowing orange eyes and horns fills the chest and stomach, with flame-like shapes behind the head. The design uses heavy grey shading with textured scales and fur, outlined in dark lines. Orange, purple and teal accents sit against the grey, and the cropped photo is taken straight on against a dark background.

Japanese Chest Other Demon Fangs Horn Flame Mask

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been falling since the lanterns were lit, and the night market on Old Fenmouth Lane has turned to a river of paper and mud. You stand under the tarpaulin of Mrs Okonedo's stall, turning a wooden mask over in your hands, the one with the flared horns and the jaw that hinges open. Nobody has bought it in three weeks. The paint has worn thin at the brow where too many fingers have pressed it.

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Her son Tobias comes in shaking water from his cap and says the man from the harbour wants it for his boat. A demon for a boat, Mrs Okonedo says, and laughs, but she takes the mask from you and holds it up to the lamp. The eyes catch the light, orange as banked coals. Her grandmother carved it, she says, for a fisherman whose wife went out in a storm and never came back. The oni was meant to stand at the prow and bite the weather.

You ask whether it worked. She shrugs. The fisherman came back every winter to oil the hinge and never once let it out of his sight. When he died, the mask went into a drawer, and the drawer went into the back room, where the rain on the tin roof sounded like someone scraping nails across it.

Tonight you hand over the coins the harbour man left and tuck the mask under your coat. Walking home, the rain finds the carved fangs and beads on the flames along the horns. At the corner you lift it to check the hinge, and it seems to you the jaw is already a little more open than it was.