A colourful Japanese-style tattoo sleeve covering a leg from thigh to calf, with a yellow creature, a red fish and green clouds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful Japanese-style leg sleeve

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo wraps around the outer thigh and down towards the calf, showing a yellow mythical creature with a long snout, a red fish, and stylised green and pink clouds. The linework is bold and black, with shading in grey for the creature and the smoke-like forms. The colour is bright and saturated across the composition, which is shot at an angle with the leg resting on a white bench.

Japanese Thigh Calf Dragon Fish Cloud Wave Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling for nine days when Abbot Tomi sent you down to the lower pond with a bucket of lime paste and instructions to be back before the evening bell. The carp were leaping again. Brother Ren said it was the rain confusing them, that they could no longer tell the water from the sky, and that you should not believe anything a fish told you about the weather.

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At the pond you find the red carp Hayato hurling himself against the stones, the same fish the novices have fed since before you arrived. Above the water the screen wall still shows the old yellow dragon the painter Kenzo made when the temple was young, its whiskers streaming through a storm of green cloud. The pink in the clouds has run down into the stone like weak tea. Someone has written a line along the bottom edge in faded ink, and you crouch to read it with rain dripping off your nose: the dragon waits for the one who looks up, not the one who looks down.

You spend the afternoon on a ladder, pressing paste into the cracks and working around the dragon's gilded eye while the fish keeps hammering the water below. When you finally look down, the carp has gone still in the shallows, its gills opening and closing in a patient rhythm, and the rain has thinned to a fine mist that hangs over the pond like smoke from a censer.

When you climb down, the dragon's whiskers seem to lift towards the bell tower, as if the wind has changed its mind. The bell rings through the mist. Below you the carp turns once, slowly, and for the first time in nine days the water lies flat.