Design of a skull in a samurai helmet with crossed katana, pink flowers and an oni mask, in a Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Samurai skull with katanas and flowers

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A skull wearing a samurai helmet sits above crossed katana swords, with pressed-together hands and clusters of pink flowers across the centre. A horned oni mask sits below, with butterflies and fan-like motifs around it. The linework and shading are mostly black and grey, with the pink flowers adding colour against a white background.

Japanese Skull Flower Peony Butterfly Hand

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

You are late with the peony cuttings, and Brother Ansei is waiting at the gate with his hands folded inside his sleeves, the way he stands when he has already decided what he will forgive. The basket is heavy with pink petals that have bruised on the walk up from the terraces. Above the lintel the carved oni mask bares its teeth at anyone who comes in carrying a grudge.

Keep reading

This season your task is to strip the old lacquer from the armour the abbot keeps in the east hall, the helmet with its iron bowl dented where a lance once struck it. Nobody will tell you whose it was. Working with a bamboo spatula, you find a line of characters scratched into the iron by someone who wanted them remembered, and then a second hand has rubbed them half away. You copy what remains onto a prayer slip. By morning the slip is gone, and the hall smells of cut stems.

On the seventh night you take a lamp down to the lower garden. Ansei is kneeling by the flat stone where the old sword-maker's ashes were scattered, palms pressed together over a clump of flowers that have opened early and too red. He does not stop when he sees you. "The dead ask for very little," he says. "Only that someone keeps the flowers coming back." He passes you a short blade wrapped in silk, its handle worn smooth as glass.

You understand the characters now. They were never a warning. You fold the silk closed and climb the steps, and behind you the butterflies lift off the wet petals one by one and drift out over the valley toward the lights of the town.