Colour neo-traditional oni demon mask tattoo with bared fangs and orange eyes across the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Oni mask on the back of a hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Colour · Photo

A green-faced oni demon mask with orange eyes, a pink tongue and bared fangs fills the back of the hand, with a small yellow sun-like motif partly visible at the wrist. Bold dark outlines define the features, with soft shading and dotted texture on the horns and cheek. The palette is mainly green, orange, yellow and pink, with red wash behind the mask and a small dotted trail below it, photographed from above on plastic sheeting.

Neo-trad Japanese Hand Fangs Eye Tongue Sun Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the pair of you, before the wasps have the last of the Discovery off the windfalls. You want the mask story? Your grandad never told it right, so I'll tell it proper. My mother's uncle came back from Yokohama in nineteen twenty-two with a carved face wrapped in newspaper and no patience for rain. Green it was, the green of an unripe Bramley, with eyes painted the colour of marmalade and a tongue hanging out like a boy caught at the back of chapel.

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He hung it in the packing shed on a nail above the cider press, and nobody liked to take it down. Every September the sun came slanting through the slats in a yellow fan, and the fangs caught it so they shone like someone had polished them with spit. The pickers swore the thing blinked when they carried the crates past. Nobody believed them, mind, until the August the mask went missing from its nail.

We found it at dawn in the long grass under the old Blenheim, facing the house, with its horns wet with dew and a trail of small red dots leading away through the trees toward the lane. My mother's uncle would not say who had been robbing the orchard. He only said the demon had gone out to see for itself, and it had come home hungry for a thief.

He swept the dots away with his boot before the pickers came and said nothing more about it. But the next morning every windfall in the Blenheim rows had a bite taken out of it, shaped like a grin with two long teeth. Hang that on your wall, if you like, but mind your fingers near the cider press.