Black and grey pen drawing of a coiled Japanese-style dragon with a open mouth, horns, whiskers and claws, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Coiled Japanese-style dragon design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A coiled, serpentine dragon with a roaring open mouth, curled horns, whiskers and clawed feet, drawn as a full design. The linework is fine and dense, with detailed scale texture along the body and shaded areas that give the form depth. The drawing is rendered in black ink on white paper with no colour, and the composition is tall and vertical.

Japanese Dragon Claw Scale Whiskers Horn Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came up out of the old culvert the week the council sent men to cut back the wisteria, and I was the only one on the path with a pair of loppers in my hand. It was longer than the greenhouse. It lifted its head over the wall until its horns scraped the guttering, then opened its mouth wide enough that I could see the rain running off its teeth, and it roared at the sky as if the sky owed it money.

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"Mind the cuttings," I said, because my mother raised me to say something sensible in a crisis. The dragon lowered its head. Its whiskers hung down like wet string. One claw, curled as long as my forearm, rested on the gravel beside the pond, and the pond went still under it. I had kept that pond for thirty-one years and never once seen the carp hold their breath. Now they did.

I told it the wisteria had been planted in 1952 by a man named Harold Pask, who had married a woman who liked her garden to climb, and that the roots had lifted the flagstones of the path where his daughter learned to ride a bicycle. The dragon's eyes, pale as boiled eggs, narrowed. I did not know if it understood. I said the council did not care about any of that, and neither, honestly, did the council's men, who would be back on Monday with a chainsaw.

The dragon uncoiled a single length of itself along the wall, slow as a tide, and pulled a strip of scale from its flank the size of a playing card. It left the scale on the pond's edge like a gift or a receipt. When the men came on Monday they found the wisteria standing, bare as a broom, and a shining grey scale on the flagstones that nobody could lift. I still keep it in the tin with the seed packets.