Japanese style colour tattoo of a black cat and a green dragon among waves, covering the upper arm and shoulder, shown in a close-up alongside a detail view.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and green dragon on an upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The image shows a large tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with a black cat in the upper left and a green dragon with red fins, yellow eyes and a red-tipped beard winding through dark stylised waves. The left panel shows the full arm in a wider view, and the right panel is a close crop of the dragon's head and body. Bold black outlines and shading sit beneath bright green, red and yellow ink, with the black wave background giving strong contrast.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Cat Dragon Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The travelling show had lost its elephant to a bank in Leeds and its strongman to a bottle in Hull, so when the autumn fair came round Mabel Tench had only her black cat, Soot, and a painted canvas of the sea to sell the crowds. The canvas showed a green dragon coiling up out of black water, its beard red as a fox's tail, its eyes yellow as the lamps on the pier. Nobody paid to look at it twice.

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One wet evening a boy from the docks came in without his coat and asked whether the dragon was real. Mabel said dragons were only sea-weather with better manners. Soot climbed onto the boy's shoulder and began to purr, which Soot did for nobody, and the boy stayed until the lamps were lit. When he left he had pinned the canvas to his own arm, and he wore the dragon's tail up past his elbow the way a sailor wears a rope he means to keep.

The show folded at Christmas. Mabel went north on the mail coach with a cardboard case and no tickets. Years later, at a harbour inn in a town she never named, a young woman with green ink still wet on her sleeve asked Mabel for the story of the dragon. Mabel told it plainly. The cat, she said, had been the only one of them who knew the sea was not to be feared, only fed.