Japanese style full arm sleeve with red lotus flowers, teal shading and grey clouds across the upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flowers and clouds on a full arm sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve of red and pink lotus flowers with blue-teal shading, set among shaded grey and brown cloud or wave forms on a black background. The flowers have fine detail in their petals and the clouds use smooth, layered greyscale shading. The design runs continuously from the shoulder down the arm, with colour concentrated in the flowers and the surrounding clouds shaded in tones of grey.

Japanese Upper arm Forearm Lotus Flower Cloud Wave Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the rain has not stopped since Tuesday, and the lotus buckets under the iron bridge are sagging like wet washing. I have strung oilcloth over the stall, but the blooms still bow their heads as if the weather were a scolding. Mrs Hayashi, who has sold lotus from that barrow longer than the bridge has stood, says the flowers do not mind the wet. They grow out of black mud and come up clean, she says, so why should a little sky trouble them? I told her the mud at the bottom of the canal is not the mud I remember from the Tatsuno fields, and she laughed until she had to sit down on her crate.

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The clouds came down off the hills yesterday in low grey banks, rolling over the roofs one behind another, layered like the waves Father used to paint on the lacquer screens. I stood in the doorway and watched them thicken and curl and break against the gutters, and I thought of the old screen in the back room, the one with the gold leaf worn away where your elbows used to rest. Some of the flowers I sell look exactly like the ones on that screen, red at the edge and blue-green in the shadow of the petals, as if someone had dipped a brush in the pond and forgotten to wipe it.

This morning a customer came early, before the rain started again, a man with a wooden box under his arm. He bought three stems and asked me to wrap them in newspaper so the wet would not reach them on the walk home. I did, and I added a fourth without charging him, because the one at the top of the bucket had opened overnight and was too beautiful to sell to someone who would only put it in a vase by the television. I am sending you this letter with a pressed petal inside, so you will know the rain here has not drowned everything. Come home when the clouds lift, and bring the screen.