Black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a seated woman with long hair holding a katana, with red lips and a red sword tassel, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with katana in Japanese style

Japanese · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A seated woman with long dark hair and red lips holds a katana across her body, dressed in loose, flowing robes. The linework is bold and sketchy, with grey and black shading giving depth to the hair and fabric. Small areas of red appear on the lips and the sword tassel, against a pale, lightly shaded background of skin.

Japanese Thigh Woman Sword Kimono Long hair Tassel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the blade first, wedged in the mortar of the north keep where the wall has split like a loaf. The rain has been at it for years, and the steel has gone the colour of wet slate, but the tassel still hangs from the hilt, red silk faded to brown at the ends. Nobody from the village will climb up here with you, so you go alone, with a torch and a bag of rice cakes your mother packed without asking why.

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The inner room still holds the shape of a woman seated on the boards, though the boards themselves have rotted through to the joists. Her robes would have been indigo once. You can tell where the folds lay because the dust settled differently there. The katana rests across her knees as if she had only stepped out to watch the weather, and her long hair, black and heavy, has been left to spread over the floor like spilled ink.

Your grandfather told you the lord's daughter held this castle for three months after the men had gone south. He told it badly, always skipping the part about how it ended, so you have spent your whole childhood filling the gap yourself. Now you crouch beside her and see that the blade is not broken. It is simply turned, its edge pointed away from her, as if she had decided at the last that the thing she had been guarding was not worth the cutting.

You lift the sword with both hands. It is lighter than you expected. Under the tassel, a stain the colour of old plums has dried into the wood, and you think of the letter in your coat pocket, the one that came yesterday from the city, the one you have not opened. You leave the sword where it lies, take the rice cakes out of the bag, set them on the boards beside her, and go down the stairs before the light fails.