Black and grey ink drawing of a samurai with a topknot holding a katana over one shoulder, surrounded by ink splatters, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Samurai with katana ink splash design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A standing samurai in a flowing robe, with a topknot and a katana resting over the shoulder, is drawn in bold black ink with a second blade held low. Loose ink splatters and wash-like textures surround the figure and extend across the white background, with solid black areas on the armour and clothing. The image is composed as a single central figure with no colour.

Japanese Ink splatter Sword Warrior

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow Tower had been dead since Tuesday, so Mr Pell and I took the stairs, fourteen floors with his shopping bag knocking against both our knees. He stopped on every landing to get his breath back and pretend he was admiring the view through the wired glass.

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On the eleventh floor the decorators had left a bottle of Indian ink on the windowsill, and someone had knocked it over. Black spatter had flown up the cream walls and across the lino in a fan, a dozen dark bursts like stars that had given up halfway. Mr Pell crouched, which took a long time, and dabbed at one with the cuff of his cardigan. 'Leave it,' he said. 'My brother would have called that a composition.'

His brother had been a signwriter in Hull who painted swordsmen on the backs of pub mirrors and, to his wife's dismay, on the walls of the flat they rented above a chip shop. Mr Pell took a photograph from his wallet to show me: a man in a long robe, a blade resting across one shoulder, another hanging low from the hip, the whole figure smudged as though it had been painted in a hurry and then caught in the rain. 'Trick is to let the ink decide where it goes,' Mr Pell said. 'You only hold the brush.'

We reached the fourteenth floor as the light went orange over the car park. He unlocked his door, set the bag down, and looked back down the stairwell at the spatter below us, now just a scatter of dark shapes on the landing. 'Still standing,' he said, and went in to put the kettle on.