Black and grey realism tattoo of a multi-storey pagoda above gnarled bare branches, running down the upper arm and forearm.

Pagoda and bare tree on an arm sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a tall, multi-tiered pagoda with balconies and curved roofs on the upper arm, with mist behind it, and dark, twisted bare branches covering the forearm below. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, with soft grey wash in the sky and dense black detail in the branches. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the arm as a sleeve-style composition.

Realism Japanese Upper arm Forearm Tree Branches Mist Sleeve Building

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs officer at Dover turned my passport over twice, as if the back might say something different from the front. Behind me the ferry engines were still ticking as they cooled. I had a crate of my grandfather's paintings in the boot, wrapped in bedsheets, and a lie about where I'd bought them ready on my tongue. He never asked. He only wanted to know why a man would carry a pagoda from Osaka to Kent in a tube.

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I told him the truth, which was that my grandfather had drawn it from memory every winter for forty years, always the same building, always with the same bare tree crowding its lower storey like a hand reaching up out of the ground. The officer lifted the top sheet. Grey wash for the mist, black ink for the branches, the roofs curling at their corners like the ends of old paper. He looked at it for longer than the form required.

He stamped the passport and handed it back. Then he said his own father had come over in 1962 with nothing but a sketchbook, and asked if the tree in the drawing was the one that still stood in the car park at the back of the old Shell garage in Sheffield. I said I thought it was. He nodded slowly, waved the car through, and I drove off with the crate rattling softly on the back seat, the tree still growing in the corner of every sheet.