Black and grey Japanese style samurai in horned helmet and armour covering a full sleeve on the upper arm and forearm, with blossom above the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Samurai in armour full sleeve tattoo

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo shows a samurai warrior in layered armour and a horned helmet, with a mask-like face and a clenched fist raised near the shoulder. Fine shading and a ribbon-like band wrap across the armour, with a blossom spray visible near the top of the shoulder and a further panel of armour toward the wrist. The design is rendered in black and grey with strong contrast, and the arm is photographed against a large dark printed backdrop.

Japanese Realism Upper arm Forearm Armour Helmet Mask Blossom Ribbon Warrior Sleeve

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret Oduya had been put in charge of the raffle and the name badges, and by half past six the sports hall smelled of floor polish and warm sausage rolls. She had not expected the armour. It stood beside the piano where the caretaker had wheeled it out of the drama cupboard, lacquered plates laced with black cord, the horned helmet tipped back as if its owner had only stepped away to think. Nobody had booked it for the reunion. Nobody had booked anything.

Keep reading

Terry Palmer came in late, still in his work boots, and stopped dead at the piano. He had been the boy who drew samurai in the margins of every exercise book, the boy Mr Fenwick once caught sketching a fist-clenched warrior across the back of a Year Ten algebra paper. "Is that the one from the cupboard?" he asked. "I thought they'd binned it." Margaret said the caretaker had saved it for the leavers' film, and Terry crouched beside the helmet, looking at the iron mask with its tight, furious mouth.

"I never finished the ribbon," he said. He pulled a folded square of paper from inside the helmet, soft as cloth, and opened it out. It was the drawing: a warrior in layered armour, a band of ribbon curling across the shoulder, and in the corner a spray of blossom that had been rubbed out and drawn again. Fenwick had pinned it to the staffroom board for a month. Terry said he had kept the blossom because it was the only bit nobody had told him to change.

Margaret found a loose length of black cord in her cardigan pocket and, without quite deciding to, held it out. Terry looped it through the gap in the lacquered plates, drew it tight, and grinned at the mask the way he must have grinned at his teacher thirty years before. The hall filled behind them with names and handshakes, and the armour kept its chin up, waiting for the ribbon to be finished.