Black and grey Japanese-style dragon tattoo wrapping around the outer thigh and hip, with its head and open jaws at the top.

Black and grey dragon wrapped around a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with an open-mouthed head, whiskers and clawed feet coils over the hip and down the outer thigh. The scales, fins and claws are rendered with fine linework and smooth grey shading that gives the body volume. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and fills most of the frame against a dark tiled wall.

Japanese Thigh Dragon Scale Claw Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up heavy off the Dogger Bank on a grey Tuesday, and Dougie swore it was a sunken boom until the bag split and something lifted its head out of the mesh. Its whiskers hung longer than our mainboom, pale and fluttering in the spray, and its jaw opened on a row of teeth as thick as cod spines. I had the winch stopped before I knew I'd moved.

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The body kept coming for what felt like a full minute, grey-black scales catching the deck lamp, fins spread like the wings of a wet sail. Its claws had hooked the gunwale and bent the rail, and the cook was on his knees by the hatch saying the Lord's Prayer backwards. Dougie wanted the head mounted over the wheelhouse door. Nobody argued with him, but nobody moved to help either.

I took my fillet knife and cut the twine where it bit into the mesh. The creature looked at me with eyes like boiled gooseberries, steady for long enough to make a man think. Then the coil slid off the stern and the sea closed over it without a splash. A single scale stayed behind on the pound boards, the size of a dinner plate, and I have kept it in the wheelhouse ever since, propped under the barometer.

Forty years on, the younger skippers laugh when I order the nets hauled an hour early on Tuesdays. Still, every week I see the swell lift in a long slow curve off the port bow, a ripple shaped like a body wrapped around the hull, and it always turns away toward the deep. I do not fish that ground now. The other boats do, and their catch is fine, and I tell them nothing.