Back tattoo of a seated samurai holding two swords within a black ink ensō circle and a red brushstroke, in a watercolour-style trash polka style across the upper back.

Seated samurai with enso circle on a back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a seated, bare-backed warrior with a sword held in each hand, set inside a large black brushed ensō circle. A vertical red brushstroke runs behind the figure and down toward the lower back, with dark ink washes forming the hakama-like lower body. The shading on the figure is greyscale and the red is bold and painterly, giving a loose, high-contrast composition centred on the spine.

Japanese Back Sword Brushstroke Warrior

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Thursday the fourth. Wind gone north-west and the sea too big for the boat, so the supplies stay in the cove and we make do with tinned pears and the last of the flour. Mr Okamura has not spoken since the relief left on Tuesday. He sweeps the gallery at six with the same stiff broom, then sits on the iron step with his back to the lamp and his two blades laid across his knees, and he does nothing with them at all. I have stopped asking him what they are for.

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The lens has a red sector on the seaward side, the one that warns ships off Scarrow Teeth. When the great lamp turns, that red comes round slow as a bar of paint poured down the water, and every night he watches it go as if it owes him something. Then he takes a brush from his pocket, dips it in the lamp oil and draws a circle on the slate by the stair, one stroke, never lifting, never quite closing it. He says it is so the light has somewhere to start.

On Saturday the glass cracked in the squall and the wick guttered at midnight. I climbed up with my heart in my throat, expecting the worst, and found him already there, kneeling at the mantle with his sleeves rolled, trimming the wick by hand while the wind tried to take the roof off. He did not look round. He only said, Keep the circle turning, and I understood he meant the lamp, and maybe also something he had carried up those stairs long before he ever saw this rock.

By morning the slate was scoured clean by spray. Beside the stair, though, fresh and dark and perfectly round, he had drawn another. I have left it there. The relief boat is due Monday, and I expect he will be on it, but I will keep the circle as it is, and when the red comes round at dusk I will watch it the way he taught me.