Colour tattoo of a blue-grey and green Eastern-style dragon coiling across a person's upper back, shown in a Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and green dragon across a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large dragon coils diagonally across the upper back, with a pale grey-blue body, scaled texture, and green fins, mane and tail. The shading is smooth and soft, with the scales, claws and whiskers defined by dark outlines and light highlights. The design fills most of the frame against bare skin, and part of another coloured tattoo is visible at the left edge.

Japanese Back Dragon Scale Whiskers Claw Fin Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lamp closer, and mind the goat, it has opinions about my stories. You want the dragon of the salt pan? Then sit still, because she does not care for people who fidget. Out past the last well, where the road gives up and turns to rumour, she lay coiled around a spring the colour of slate. Her body was pale grey and smooth as river stone, and her fins and mane were green as the reeds that grew only where she breathed. Drivers saw her whiskers first, trailing above the crust like threads of tarred rope, and they turned their camels around before the sun went down.

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One summer a cart-mender called Ilyas came down that road with a broken axle, a dead brother's debt and a water skin with one drink left in it. He did not turn back. He walked to the edge of the salt and called out that his mother was dying in the village beyond, and asked for a single cupful. The dragon's eye opened, pale as a moon behind cloud. She said the price was a name no living person had spoken in a hundred years. Ilyas had no idea what name she meant, so he walked back to the last well and asked every keeper, and every keeper spat and shut their gate.

On the ninth day an old woman selling dates at the oasis looked at his cracked lips and told him. He went back across the salt at night, stood at the edge of the spring, and said the name aloud. The coils loosened one by one. Silver water rose up the shaft in a column, and the dragon lowered her head to his palm, cool and heavy as a sleeping cat. Now it will be remembered, she said, and sank back into the dark. Ilyas filled his skin and reached the village by dawn, and his mother drank first.