Black and grey Japanese style tattoo covering a torso and upper arm, with a pagoda, an oni demon holding prayer beads, clouds and a dragon on the sleeve.

Pagoda and oni demon torso and sleeve

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A man's torso and left arm are covered by a large black and grey tattoo. A pagoda rises through swirling clouds and flames above an oni demon holding prayer beads, with a dragon and clouds running down the sleeve. Shading is smooth and detailed, with script lettering across the chest and ribs.

Japanese Realism Lettering Upper arm Forearm Chest Ribs Demon Dragon Cloud Flame Script Lettering Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old women of Hallow Ridge said the pagoda had stood on the cinder plain since before the Glass Rains, and that the oni who lived beneath its eaves was the reason no one had burned in the valley for three generations. Nobody had seen him come down the stairs. Some said he was taller than the doorframe. My grandmother said he kept a cord of a hundred and eight beads, one for every wrong the valley had done, and that he counted them each dusk with his claws because his hands were too big for the knots.

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The year the river went dry, a salt-worker's son called Ansel climbed the hill with a jar of water he had carried from the last pool. He was not brave. He was thirsty, and his mother had said the demon could not refuse a gift. The oni sat with the fire behind him and the smoke curling up through the clouds painted on the wall, and he listened without speaking while Ansel told him about the cracked mud and the dead carp and the dragon that slept under the riverbed and breathed heat up through the stones.

When the boy had finished, the oni drew one bead from the cord and turned it over in his palm. It was grey, like the ash on the plain. He told Ansel that the wrongs of the valley had grown heavy, and that the dragon was only the last of them. Then he dropped the bead into the coals, and a long pale smoke rose and bent toward the river like a finger pointing the way.

In the morning the river ran again, thin and brown, and the pagoda's roof was wet with dew. Ansel's mother took the empty jar down the hill and found the oni's claw-print pressed into the mud at the gate, deep enough to hold water.