Tattoos
"How can I draw a beautiful woman on your chest," asked the Third Emperor's impudent Tattoo Master, "when the only woman worthy of you is tattooed on mine?"
On the breast of the geisha Tsieou Kin, an expert hand had drawn a golden bee that sucked from her roselike nipple. Evidently, this caused the down-fall of the second governor of the Minamoto family.
She had a dream of water, a fluid dream that ended in the irregular transparency of a pond. In it, the most distant landscapes, the secret places of childhood, were drawn over a nostalgic inversion of impossibility. The reflection of a flying duck made her doubt the dream's reality. To test herself, she imagined she was a naked boy, swimming. When she awoke, her breast was graced by a carp drawn by some friendly hand.
In order to engender the perfect child, Madame Tai tattooed an angel over her womb.
"Here, love and art use a single space to clarify one other," said the ancient master as he showed the wondrous skin of a youth where he had tattooed a dove surprised by a hawk. This anecdote is told of the Tattoo Master of the Second Emperor, a painter as well-known for the liberality of his ways as the ambiguity of his words. During the Minamoto shogunate, the telling of this story was forbidden.
The ruthless shogun Ieyasu is credited with this warning: "You can engrave whatever you'd like on the bodies of the geishas, but you must respect the stone of the public statues."
Before leaving for war, the shogun of Nara had his wife's flawless abdomen engraved with the shadow of a terrible dragon. It seems that during the extended Gempei conflict the lady of Nara took pleasure in the imagination of a samurai who discovered she was unprotected from the rear.
So softly, with the voice of an autumn wind, while hiding distraught behind the pearl screen, the young but widowed Empress, when asked by her eunuchs to agree to marry again for the good of the Empire, unsteadily replied, "I will agree, but my new husband must wear the serene smile of my dead husband tattooed on his chest."
The Parchment Master of the Great Court was executed in Kyoto in the 13th century for producing a malicious tattoo on the chest of the shogun Kamakura, and for inciting the drawing to assassinate, as it did, its owner.
Rafael Perez Estrada
Translated from the Spanish by Steven J. Stewart
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