Tatsuki Arisawa

Lean and boyish where her best friend Orihime is soft and curvy, Tatsuki keeps a tomboy's look, of middling height with brown eyes and dark hair. For years she wore it short and spiked at the sides, switching to a longer style that fell past her shoulders after the seventeen-month gap, then cropping it back to her neck a decade on. She turns up most often in her school uniform or a plain karate gi.

Bold, blunt, and hot-blooded, Tatsuki stays easygoing until someone provokes her, at which point her considerable strength does the talking; anyone who torments her friends or insults Orihime tends to get hit. She reads Ichigo better than most, having hauled him out of scrapes and low moods since they were small, and she dreams of a vale tudo title, already rated the second-strongest girl her age in the country.

Her lone concession to femininity is writing her given name in hiragana. Since middle school she has shielded Orihime from unwanted suitors and from the amorous Chizuru Honshō, a vow she made after beating back bullies who tried to cut Orihime's hair.

Tatsuki met Ichigo at four years old at the dojo where she trained, claiming the honor of being the first to make him cry there, and she routinely bested him until he finally won a match in the sixth grade. When his mother died and he took to wandering the riverbank instead of school, Tatsuki went searching for him, an image that never left her. She and Orihime grew close in middle school soon after Orihime lost her brother, with Tatsuki appointing herself protector.

Though she wields no powers of her own, Tatsuki is spiritually aware enough to glimpse Hollows and Shinigami, and she brushes against the supernatural again and again: nearly killed by the Hollow Acidwire, controlled and then freed during Orihime's fight with Numb Chandelier, drained by Yammy Llargo's Gonzui, and later brought to her knees yet still conscious under the crushing presence of Aizen. Trained in karate from a young age, she even placed second in a national tournament while nursing a broken arm.