Kanji character flash sheet with translations
Lettering · Black and grey · Flash
A grid of eight by seven black brush-style kanji characters on a white background, each labelled beneath in small red capitals with its English meaning. The characters are solid black strokes with no shading, arranged in evenly spaced rows. The red labels are the only colour, so the design reads as a black ink lettering reference sheet.
Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.
A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The man who came over the Kessel pass in October carried his grandmother's sheet of characters rolled in oilcloth, and when he spread it across my customs table the rain had already soaked a corner of it. Sixty black brush-marks in neat rows, each with a small red word beneath, as if she had wanted anyone who read it to know exactly what she meant. He wanted to know which of them were safe to say aloud in the valley below, because the papers he carried had been stamped by men who did not like the sound of certain things.
Keep reading
So I read them to him, one by one, the way my father taught me to read a bill of lading. Olive tree. Key. Lake. Land. Lion, panther, rabbit, pig. Rock, sand, river. When I reached the fourth row I slowed down, because my father had once told me the river had taken the old customs house in the spring flood, and that the stones of the new one had come from the same bank. The man listened with his hand flat on the paper, not on the words but beside them, as though the sheet might lift away in the draught.
He tapped a character near the bottom, the one labelled remember, and asked whether it could be written on a stamp. I said a stamp could carry anything if the clerk was tired enough. He smiled at that. Then he told me she had never crossed the pass herself, that she had only drawn the sheet so her grandson would learn the names of the things he was going to leave behind. I did not ask what he was leaving. Outside, the rain eased off and the cloud lifted from the first ridge.
I took my brush from the drawer, dipped it in the ink I kept for signatures, and wrote that character on the back of his travel permit. Then I stamped it, date and all, and pushed it across the table. It was not an official mark. It was the only thing I had that was true, and he folded it inside the oilcloth with the sheet, very carefully, the way you carry something you intend to unfold again.
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