A gloved tattooist works on a black and grey Japanese-style tattoo of clouds and flowing lines on a person's skin.

Japanese-style cloud tattoo being inked

Japanese · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A tattooist in black gloves uses a tattoo machine on a large black and grey design of stylised clouds, swirling scrollwork and flowing lines. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading filling the background behind the clouds. The tattoo looks fresh and in progress, with the gloved hand and machine at the centre of a close, slightly angled composition.

Japanese Other Cloud Swirl Scrollwork Tattoo machine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink would not sit still, so Haruka pressed the brush flat and let the grey bloom out across the paper like weather coming over the ridge. Her master had warned her about this stage. Black lines first, he said, then the mist, and never the other way round, or the clouds would drown the dragon's whiskers before they had grown.

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The commission came from a salt merchant in Tsuruga who wanted clouds for the ceiling of his bathhouse and nothing else. Each morning Haruka climbed the ladder with a brass pot of lamp-black and a tray of soft brushes, and each morning the clouds had moved in the night, drifting over the beams toward the north wall as if they had somewhere better to be. She fixed them with a fine dry line and went down to eat her rice cold.

On the ninth day she stopped trying to hold them. She followed the curl where a cloud edge folded back on itself, the scroll she had drawn fourteen times already, and let the stroke run longer than planned, past the beam, down the plaster, until the curl became a spiral that closed around nothing at all.

When the merchant came to see, he looked up for a long time with his hands behind his back. "They're going somewhere," he said. "Yes," Haruka said, wiping her fingers on her apron. "That is why they stay." By evening the ink had dried to a soft iron colour. The steam from the bath rose through the room and met the painted cloud, and for a moment it seemed to thicken and hang over the water, as though it had finally decided to rest.