Black ink tattoo of a panda hanging from a bamboo branch with leaves trailing down, in a brush-style Japanese design on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Panda and bamboo on the upper back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A panda clings to a thin bamboo branch at the upper right, with its head turned to the side and its limbs curled around the stem. Bamboo leaves trail down and to the left in tapering, brush-like strokes, with soft grey shading on some of the leaves. The design is entirely black ink on pale skin, with generous open space around the motif.

Japanese Botanical Back Panda Branch Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Tomas had painted the same bamboo for thirty winters, and the abbot said it was the only thing in the monastery that bent without breaking. On the morning the panda came down from the ridge, he was grinding ink at the south window and did not look up until the scraping stopped.

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It sat on the lowest branch of the grove beyond the wall, holding the stem with all four limbs, the way a child holds a rail on a ferry. It did not eat. It turned its round head toward the monk and seemed to wait, as a customer waits at a market stall for the price to be named.

So Tomas took his brush and painted it a branch. He painted the leaves trailing down and to the left, quick and tapering, leaving pale paper between them so the wind could pass through. When he lifted the brush, the panda was still there, clinging to a thin young stem that had not been on the wall before.

The abbot later found the scroll pinned to the gate. He could not tell which stroke was the panda's and which was the grove's, and he said that was the sign the monk had been painting for thirty years without knowing it. The panda was never seen on the ridge again, though the bamboo grew back that spring along the wall, pale and bending, exactly where the ink had left it room.