Close view of a colourful Japanese-style tattoo with a crane, cherry blossoms and a bearded robed figure across the ribs, with a mask on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese-style tattoo with crane and robed figure

Japanese · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a large Japanese-style tattoo covering the side of a torso and the upper arm. It shows a crane in flight, a bearded robed figure holding a staff, a small mask-like face on the arm, and cherry blossom sprays set against dark cloud shapes. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with red, green, blue and skin-toned ink on a dark black background.

Japanese Ribs Upper arm Crane Cherry blossom Cloud Robe Mask Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove and mind the kettle, it spits. You'll want to hear this properly, because my grandfather told it to me on the gallery during a gale, and nobody tells a story right with the lamp swinging over their head. He kept the light on Skerrin Head for forty years, and the only thing that ever came up out of the fog that he couldn't explain was a crane.

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It came in the October the cannery shut, low over the swell with its wings spread wide as a barn door. Behind it the cloud banks rolled in pink and grey, and on the rocks below the cliff path sat an old man under a cherry tree that had no business growing in salt wind. He wore a long blue robe and carried a staff with a gourd lashed to the top, and he was laughing at the sea as though it had told him a joke he'd heard before.

Grandfather climbed down with a lantern and a bottle of cheap brandy, because you do not leave a stranger on the rocks in weather. The old man would not come up. He said the crane was waiting on him and the blossom would not last past the tide. When Grandfather asked what he wanted, the old man lifted his staff and pointed up at the lamp room, where the great lens was turning its slow white eye across the water.

So they sat together until the fog thinned. The crane lifted, the petals went out on the wind, and when the light came back the rock was bare and wet. The brandy was gone, though Grandfather swore he'd never opened it. Some of the old keepers said the sea takes its share of every watch, and a sensible man keeps the lamp lit and doesn't ask who was paid.