Black and grey Japanese style dragon tattoo running down a person's back from the shoulder to the waist.

Black and grey dragon across a back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A long serpentine dragon with a bearded head near the left shoulder coils down the spine to the lower back. The scales and fins are rendered with dark shading and fine white highlights, and a small red eye stands out against the greys. The composition fills most of the back, with the figure cropped above the neck and below the waistband.

Japanese Back Dragon Serpent Claw Scale Fin Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the lock keeper's lamp is out and the tow horse is asleep, so you'll have to take my word for it. The dragon of the Tarrant Cut was no bigger than a narrowboat when it first came, only longer, coiling from the weir head down the towpath like a rope somebody had dropped. Its whiskers trailed in the reeds and its fins took the colour of wet slate.

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Old Sarah Bunce, who kept the Patience moored below the bridge, said it hunted nothing. It only counted. Every boat that passed through the lock, it counted the bargemen's children, and every spring it took one thing back from the water: a bucket, a hat, once a brass lamp off a cabin roof. Folk left offerings on the lock beam, bread and matches and once a wedding ring, and the dragon took them politely, claws first, and kept its one red eye on the river.

Then in the wet year of the flood, a boy named Tom Ashby climbed the lock gate with a tin of paraffin and no sense at all. He meant to fire the reeds where the dragon slept so it would move on. The eye opened over the water like a coal dropped in a bucket, and the boy stopped halfway up the gate, because the creature was not angry. It was tired, and it had been waiting for someone brave or foolish enough to lift the sluice.

So he lifted it. The river came down the Cut in a grey shoulder, the dragon went with it, scales shining in the spray, and by morning the towpath was bare. Sarah says the lamp Tom carried is still hanging in the chandlery window in Ely. Ask her, and she'll tell you the dragon never really left. It only went down to see what else the river was carrying.