This ancient samurai sword really turned out to be one of the models that I had the most fun with during creation. In the beginning I didn't know much about the historical background and effort that was put into creating those swords, but while I was looking up information about everything I had to model, I learned a lot about the meaning of all the individual parts - some are practical and some purely decorative.

The "Menuki" is a decorative element that was initially added underneath the grip-wrap to hide the pins that hold the blade inside the handle. It is usually unique to the sword and serves as a sort of "lucky charm" to the sword holder. In my case, I went for a lotus flower ornament (click on the image below for full size).

By the way, did you know that the handle was usually wrapped in ray skin (the yellow pattern underneath the grip-wrap)?

The carvings on this blade are kanji characters (literally "Han characters", meaning "Chinese letters"), which are traditionally used in the Japanese writing system. The characters of this blade read the name of the sword (龍 = (male) dragon) and date it was created (元禄丁丑 = 4th heavenly stem and 2nd earthly branch (10th year) of the Genroku era (1688 - 1704)).

To suit the sword's name, I also painted some dragon/sky elements onto the protection plate between the handle and the blade.