During the Edo period (1600–1868), Japanese tattooing — irezumi — evolved from its earlier use as criminal punishment branding into a sophisticated art form associated with artisans, firemen, gamblers, and the working classes. Practitioners developed full-body designs incorporating motifs from Chinese mythology, woodblock print aesthetics, and Buddhist iconography, executed with hand-held needles and ink in compositions that treated the entire human body as a single pictorial field. The period produced a distinct aesthetic vocabulary of carp, dragons, waves, and cherry blossoms that remains globally influential.

Edo-period irezumi developed in close dialogue with the woodblock print tradition that also produced Hokusai and Hiroshige, whose visual language profoundly influenced European Impressionist and Symbolist poets when Japanese art arrived in the West in the 1860s. The 'japonisme' that swept through the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and later Ezra Pound drew on the same visual culture that shaped irezumi aesthetics. Japanese poets of the haiku tradition — Bashō, Buson, Issa — wrote within a culture where the decorated body was an art-world presence, deepening poetry's engagement with impermanence and beauty inscribed on perishable matter.