Black and grey pencil drawing of a Japanese-style sleeve design showing a samurai mask, koi, dragon, peony and waves, with no body part visible.

Japanese sleeve design with samurai, koi and dragon

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A full sleeve design drawn in pencil, showing a samurai or oni style mask at the top with a koi fish and a dragon below it. Peonies, lotus flowers and stylised swirling waves fill the gaps and run down the length of the composition. The work uses fine hatching and dense shading in black and grey, with a tall vertical layout suited to a sleeve.

Japanese Koi Dragon Peony Lotus Wave Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of October the rain had found every gap in Gull Crest, and Mrs Vokes had given up on the lounge fire, so you carried the roll of paper down to the breakfast room and unrolled it across two tables. Someone had drawn it in pencil, a long sheet of hatching and shadow. At the top a mask grimaced under a helmet of lacquered plates, its brows swept back like wings. Below it a koi rose through a tangle of peonies and lotus, and below that a dragon coiled out of a wave that seemed to keep moving even while you looked at it.

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'Mr Ashdown drew that the winter before he went out on the Maud,' Mrs Vokes said, setting down a teapot without asking whether you wanted it. 'Never came back for his trunk. Said the sea was the only thing in Hastings that paid him any attention.' She tapped the bottom edge, where the waves broke into fine silver lines. 'He wanted the water to climb the page, he said. Took patience, getting it right.'

You meant to leave it at that. But on the third morning the drawing was on the floor of your room, weighted down with your boots, and the sea in the lower half had grown darker, the strokes heavier, as if someone had been at it in the night with a softer lead. The koi had moved. Its nose now pushed past the lotus toward the mask, and the dragon's eye, which had been closed, was open and looking at the window.

You folded the sheet along its old crease and walked down to the harbour with it under your coat. At the slipway you opened it and held it flat against the wind until the paper went soft and grey, and the lines ran into the water like ink, the peonies first, then the mask, until only the koi was still swimming, going up and up toward a light you could not see.