Kiyohime Tattoo Meaning: The Serpent Woman of Dōjōji and Design Ideas

Kiyohime Tattoo Meaning: The Serpent Woman of Dōjōji and Design Ideas

Kiyohime is one of the most dramatic women in Japanese folklore: a young woman whose rage at a broken promise turned her into a serpent that chased a monk across a river and burned him inside a temple bell. Her story has been told in Buddhist tales, picture scrolls, Noh, kabuki and woodblock prints for close to a thousand years, and it gives tattoo clients a powerful image of passion, transformation and consequence. Here is the legend, how the old print masters pictured her, and how we design Kiyohime tattoos for clients in Perth, regional Western Australia, Sydney, Melbourne and across Australia.

Top image: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Kiyohime Changing into a Serpent at the Hidaka River, from New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts, 1890. National Diet Library, Japan (Digital Collections PID 1309662). Public domain.

The legend of Kiyohime and Anchin

The tale is tied to Dōjōji, a Tendai Buddhist temple in Hidaka, in today’s Wakayama Prefecture (old Kii Province). The best-known version runs like this. A young monk, later named Anchin, is travelling on pilgrimage to Kumano and stays overnight at the house of a local steward. The steward’s daughter, Kiyohime, falls for him. To get away, he promises to come back for her on his return journey, then takes a different road home.

When Kiyohime realises she has been deceived, she runs after him. At the Hidaka River, Anchin asks the ferryman not to carry her across. She plunges into the water and, as she swims, her fury turns her into a great serpent. Anchin reaches Dōjōji and the monks hide him under the temple’s large bronze bell. The serpent finds the bell, coils around it and breathes fire until the bell glows red hot, and Anchin dies inside.

Where the story comes from

Kiyohime is far older than her name. The story first appears in a Buddhist collection of Lotus Sutra miracle tales compiled around 1040, and again in the Konjaku monogatari collection of about 1120. In those early versions neither the monk nor the woman is named, and the tale ends with both being saved through the Lotus Sutra after a priest copies it for them. The monk is first called Anchin in a history written around 1322, and the name Kiyohime only appears in an eighteenth-century puppet play.

The temple still keeps the Dōjōji engi emaki, a picture scroll from the Muromachi period that shows the woman’s pursuit, her change into a serpent and the burning bell. The story then moved onto the stage. In the Noh play Dōjōji, a dancer arrives years later as a new bell is being dedicated, the bell crashes down over her, and she comes back out as a horned serpent-demon wearing the hannya mask. The kabuki dance Kyōganoko Musume Dōjōji, first staged in Edo in 1753, made the tale one of the best-loved pieces in Japanese theatre. If you like that demon side of the story, our post on Hannya mask tattoos explains the mask itself.

Kiyohime in ukiyo-e prints

Woodblock artists loved Kiyohime because she lets them show a person and a monster in the same picture. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi drew her more than once. His 1865 print for the series One Hundred Ghost Tales from China and Japan shows her stepping out of a dark river with her hair loose and the waves breaking around her feet.

Twenty-five years later he came back to her in New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts (1889–1892), the print at the top of this page. Here there are no scales or fangs yet. Kiyohime wrings water from her long hair under a crescent moon, her kimono printed with triangles that echo snake scales, while waves churn and petals fall around her. It is a picture of the moment just before the change, and it is a beautiful starting point for a tattoo.

What a Kiyohime tattoo can mean

Kiyohime is not a simple villain or a simple victim, and that is why people choose her. Clients connect her with:

• Passion and devotion that will not be ignored.
• Transformation, the moment someone becomes something stronger and more dangerous than before.
• Consequences: a reminder that broken promises have a cost.
• Feminine power drawn from Japanese legend and theatre, in a design that suits both women and men.

Kiyohime tattoo design ideas

Because the story moves from woman to serpent to burning bell, there are several ways to build it:

• Kiyohime at the river: the woman with loose hair and a patterned kimono rising out of the water, taken from prints like Yoshitoshi’s. This works well on a forearm, thigh or half sleeve.
• Half woman, half serpent: her upper body still human, with scales and coils taking over from the waist down, which suits a full sleeve or leg sleeve where the body can wrap around the limb.
• The serpent and the bell: a scaled serpent wound around the Dōjōji bell, with fire and smoke, as a strong back piece or chest panel. Our Japanese snake (hebi) tattoo guide covers how we draw scales and coils.
• Hannya-faced Kiyohime: the Noh demon version, combining her face with the horned mask.

The background matters as much as the figure. Both Yoshitoshi prints set Kiyohime among river waves and falling petals, and those same elements, waves, wind bars and blossoms, are what tie a Japanese sleeve or back piece together. For bigger plans, see our guides to Japanese full arm sleeves, Japanese leg sleeves and Japanese full back tattoos. We tattoo by machine and with traditional tebori hand work, and large pieces are built over several sessions.

Start your Kiyohime tattoo

Clients come to our Barrack Street studio from all over Perth, from regional WA and from interstate. Send us photos of the area you have in mind, any existing tattoos nearby and whichever version of Kiyohime speaks to you, then book your Japanese tattoo consultation in Perth and we will sketch how her story can move across your skin.

Sources

• JAANUS (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System), entry “Dōjōji” (the temple in Hidaka, Wakayama; the tale first recorded c. 1040; the Dōjōji engi emaki; the Noh and kabuki versions)
• Kiyohime, Wikipedia, summarising the Dainihonkoku hokekyō kenki (c. 1040), Konjaku monogatarishū (c. 1120) and Genkō shakusho (c. 1322) versions and the first use of the name Kiyohime (checked against JAANUS)
• Musume Dōjōji, Kabuki21 and Wikipedia (first staged at the Nakamura-za, Edo, in 1753)
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Yoshitoshi project: New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts (series dates 1889–1892)
• National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian), Yoshitoshi, Kiyohime changing into a serpent at Hidaka River, 1890, S2003.8.3070 (title, series and date)
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yoshitoshi, Kiyohime, Emerging from the Hidaka River, Turning into a Serpent, 1865, M.84.31.125
• Images: National Diet Library Digital Collections and LACMA (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons