An embroidered appliqué in the shape of a decorated poem card (shikishi), made from a repurposed fragment of a wealthy samurai-class women's kimono. Such luxurious silk textiles were too valuable to discard after wear and were routinely repurposed into new garments (see Accession no. 2024.021). This appliqué, along with other similarly shaped embroidered fragments, would have likely been arranged in a disorderly composition and sewed onto an outer robe.

The fragment’s design depicts a Chinese hooked blade spear known as a guandao, with dragon's head hilt. The imagery likely references the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the famous weapon of Eastern Han Dynasty general Guan Yu, known as the Green Dragon Crescent Blade (靑龍偃月刀). The historic General Guan Yu was deified as the god of war in China and Japan, which could explain the motif’s appeal to members of the warrior class.