A little bit of Chinese flower pattern will be a great decision.



Layer overall opacity must be set to about 25% - 30%.







Next step will be the making of the blade. I want to flip a trick here. I've flattened all the layers made a copy of my background layer and cut the one of the layers in 2 pieces. Make a cut just where that blade should begin. So if you got me right you should have only 3 layers now. Here is some a screen shot of my layer box.



Make your canvas just a little bit wider on the left and just transform the blade" layer to the left too.







Make a selection. In this stage you should get a reference for the blade. You have to know how the lights go and the shading itself.

Make a new layer just now (the area must be selected). Overlay the area with white to transparency layer from up to down.



Add some plates to the edges of the sword. You can make it with a brush or just selecting and filling the selected areas with some color.



The next and the final step will be the creating of that metal thing that basically holds the blade in tanto swords.

Create a new document or just a new layer on your working document.

So here is the explanation of the stuff I used on this thing.



As you see - especially if you are working on the TFT display if the sword itself is nor separated from background for good. So create a new layer choose black to transparency layer and just get rid of the background bugs just separating the sword using blacks.







And this is it on making a tanto sword in Photoshop.