Raijin Arm Sleeve

This sleeve is built around Raijin, the god of thunder and lightning in Japanese mythology, one of the most recognisable figures in the traditional canon, and one of the most fun to tattoo.

You can tell it's Raijin by the drums. In the old woodblock prints, he's shown surrounded by a ring of taiko, striking them to make thunder, and that ring is exactly what wraps around this sleeve, the red discs with the swirling tomoe pattern climbing from the shoulder down to the wrist. His skin is red, his hair and beard whipped up into wild spirals, and his face is caught mid-snarl, which is how he's almost always drawn. He's not a gentle god.

The palette does a lot of the storytelling here. Red carries the whole piece, which is unusual; most traditional sleeves lean on black and grey with colour used sparingly, but Raijin is one of the figures where going heavy on red is correct rather than excessive. It's broken up with cool blue-grey clouds and a string of prayer beads in a soft turquoise, which stops the red from overwhelming the arm and gives the eye somewhere to land.

If you're after a sleeve with this kind of scale and mythology behind it, get in touch and I’ll talk through what it takes to get there.