Full-colour Japanese-style dragon design in blue and orange with orange flame-like fins, coiled and clawed, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coiled dragon design in blue and orange

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A coiled dragon with a horned, open-mouthed head, clawed limbs and a long tail curling through the composition. The scales and muscular body are rendered with bold outlines and shading in blue and orange tones. The design is centred on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Japanese Dragon Serpent Claw Scale Coil Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain has been coming down over the Sunday market since before dawn, and the awning above your stall sags with it like a belly full of water. You have sold nothing but a single brass bell all morning, to a woman who wanted it for her cat. The rest of the pitch is wet cardboard and the smell of frying onions drifting from the van two rows down.

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Then the old man from the fish stall comes running, shoes slapping, and tells you there is a creature in the canal basin under the footbridge. He says it has been coiling round the bollards since midnight, blue as a mackerel's back and orange as the flame off a gas ring, and that the gulls will not go near it. You tell him he has been at the cider. He does not laugh. He just stands there dripping and waits for you to look.

You go down with your collar up. The water is high and brown, and the thing is there, lifting its horned head out of the murk with its jaw open and a thin red tongue flicking at the rain. Its claws grip the iron rail the way a sailor grips a rope in a squall. Its scales catch the streetlamp in bands of light, blue, then amber, then blue again. It looks at you the way the bell woman looked at her cat, as if it has already decided what you are worth.

You do not run. You take off your apron, fold it, and set it on the bottom step, the way your grandmother taught you to leave something for a thing you do not understand. The rain keeps falling. Below the bridge the water stops churning, and by the time you climb back up to the stall the market is empty except for a single curl of wet orange scale on the wooden step, bright as a new coin.