Black and grey Japanese style sleeve tattoo with an oni mask, dragon and skulls on a man's forearm, beside a woman with floral tattoos on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese sleeve with oni mask and skulls

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of two people standing side by side, showing a man's forearm covered by a tattoo of a snarling oni mask, a dragon-like serpent and two skulls near the wrist. The woman's upper arm carries flowers, a bird and swirling cloud-like shapes in matching greyscale. Shading is smooth and detailed with bold outlines, and the high-contrast monochrome photo shows the design clearly.

Japanese Forearm Upper arm Dragon Skull Flower Bird Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the cloud came down off the hills and sat on the Ashby cut, and every spring Maud Tallow hung the old mask on the bow of the Heron Lass and told the children not to look at it straight. The oni had been her grandfather's, carved in a mill town she had never seen, its teeth bared and its brow knotted like a fist. He said it had come home on a boat of silk, and that a mask only keeps what it is afraid of.

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The river serpent lived under the lock gates, long as a mooring rope and grey as wet slate. Some years it took a dog, some years a lamplighter's boy who leaned too far. In the year the flood came early, it rose beneath the barge at dusk, and the water went still and smelt of struck matches. Maud did not run. She took two skulls down from the stern locker, the ones her husband had dug out of the towpath and would not let her bury, set them on the gunwale, and sang the bargeman's count in a voice she had never used on a living thing.

The serpent turned its head toward the skulls. It seemed to weigh the question they asked, which was simply whether it would be remembered, and then it sank, leaving only a slow ring of cloud over the water. Bright flowers of foam drifted down to the lock, and a heron came down among them and stood as if it had been waiting all its life.

Maud took the mask off the bow the next morning and hung it in the galley. The children still did not look at it straight, but they looked at the water a little longer, which she thought was the better lesson.