Japanese style colour tattoo of a black cat holding an arrow above a red and teal dragon, shown on a limb in two side by side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat and dragon in Japanese style

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with yellow eyes and white paws grips a long arrow, set against coils of a red and teal dragon with an open mouth and fine scale detail. The cat is filled with solid black ink and white highlights, with bold black outlines throughout. The image is a diptych showing the same tattoo from two angles against a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The toll-keeper at Kessel Ford had worked the ferry for thirty winters, and the black cat that slept on his coil of rope had never once been wet. So when the dragon rose out of the brown water that March, scales the colour of a kingfisher's back, it was the cat who stood up first.

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The dragon wanted the arrow. It was a plain ash shaft with white fletching, the only thing Tomas's dead brother had carried across the river the day the old bridge fell, and the dragon said it was owed. Tomas laughed and told it the river did not pay debts. The cat said nothing. It padded to the bow, lifted the arrow from the rack in its teeth and crouched on the gunwale with its claws hooked into the wood.

For three nights the dragon circled. Lanterns on the far bank went out one by one as travellers gave up waiting for a boat. On the fourth morning the coils lay thick across the shallows, red ribs and teal fins, and its jaws opened wide enough to swallow the mill wheel. The cat did not run. It took the arrow in both forepaws, sighted along it the way Tomas had taught the boys to aim at crows, and let the shaft drop into the water at the dragon's feet.

The dragon looked at the arrow, then at the cat, and went under without a sound. Tomas found the shaft tangled in the reeds by noon. The cat was back asleep on the rope, black as a shut door, and when the first lantern came on again across the water he did not so much as open his yellow eyes.

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