Two colour Japanese oni mask tattoos on the backs of hands, one green and one red, edged with gold swirling clouds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twin oni masks on the backs of hands

Japanese · Hand · Colour · Photo

Two demon-faced oni masks are tattooed across the backs of the hands, with bared fangs, bulging red-rimmed eyes and furrowed brows. The left mask is shaded in green and the right in red, both outlined in dark lines and framed by gold scrollwork and swirling clouds. The photograph is taken straight on, so both designs are shown evenly side by side.

Japanese Hand Cloud Fangs Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You stood at the byre door with your brother while the snow came sideways off the ridge, two guardians nobody had asked for, fangs bared at a dark where the lane used to be. Ada Penhallow had painted you both onto a board years ago and hung you above the feed bin, and you had never forgiven her for the gold clouds, which made you look like a sweet shop sign. Your brother, red as a pillar box and twice as stubborn, said the wind was only wind. You said the wind had been carrying lambs off one by one since Martinmas and nobody had seen a single one again. He said that was the fox. You both knew it was not the fox, because foxes do not leave their bells behind in the hedge.

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Then a lantern bobbed on the lane. It was Ada's boy, Tom, seven years old and wrapped in a sack, following the faint tinkle of the last ewe's bell into the white. You had not stepped past the gate in a hundred winters. You did it anyway, and the snow parted around your gold scrolls like water around a stone. Your brother came after you, grumbling the whole way, his breath rising in red-grey clouds that shaped themselves into the same swirls painted on your foreheads.

The wind came down off the ridge with a voice like a hinge, and it found two demons standing between it and the child. It did not care for the sight. It went off to bother the next valley, complaining.

In the morning the thaw had turned the lane to brown slush, and the ewe was bleating in the straw of the barn. Tom was asleep beside her with his thumb in his mouth, and the board above the feed bin had a fresh dusting of snow on its frame. You looked at your brother. He looked at you. Neither of you admitted that the scowls had softened, not even a little.