Colour tattoo of a white masked spirit character with black features, surrounded by red peonies and green leaves, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Masked spirit character with red peonies

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A white, faceless spirit figure with black eye and mouth markings sits centrally, framed by large red peony blooms with black outlines. Bold black linework defines the outlines, with grey shading giving the mask its dimension and small green leaves filling the gaps. Red ink dominates the composition, and the design fills the frame with a tight, balanced arrangement.

Japanese Traditional Upper arm Spirit Mask Peony Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The pit gave up nothing today but a dead rat and Harry Lowe's boots, which we buried without him. Mam says I am to stop writing about the grey man, so I will tell it properly once and then leave it be.

He came up the cinder path the night after the cage stopped. White as a boiled egg, with no face to speak of, only three black slits where eyes and a mouth ought to be. He did not knock. He stood by the lamp-house door as though waiting for a shift to start, and peonies came up through the slag at his feet, red as the coke fire and fatter every hour. Mrs Ashby swept them off the step twice and they were back by morning, pressed against the glass like hands.

Dad's cough has gone. A year of it, bringing up black on his handkerchief, and since the grey man sat down on the lamp-house bench it has simply stopped. I left a bowl of rice on the step last night, the good rice from the Co-op, and a candle in a jam jar beside it, because Mrs Ashby says that is how you thank a thing like that without asking it for anything.

This morning the bowl was empty and the candle was out. There was a single petal on Dad's pillow, very red, very wet, and a smell of cut grass in a house that has not seen grass in forty years. He is still breathing. I keep thinking you should come home for a week and see him breathe.

Your sister, Nell