Black and grey Japanese-style dragon tattoo with its head on the chest and its body wrapping over the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon across chest and shoulder

Japanese · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A dragon with a detailed head, flowing whiskers and horns sits on the upper chest, and its serpentine body curls over the shoulder and down the upper arm. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading along the scales and body to give depth and form. The image is a close crop of bare skin, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Japanese Chest Shoulder Upper arm Dragon Scale Whiskers Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on Harrow Mere had not gone out by Candlemas, and the ewes at Lower Cold Farm would not drink from the trough no matter how the water was carried. Agnes Pell took the cracked hammer from its nail and walked down through the snow with the dog at her heel. She had heard the old talk about what lay under the water, a long grey thing with whiskers like frost on wire, but her father called it nonsense, so she went on.

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At the mere edge the ice was singing, a low note running under her boots. She struck once, then twice, and the third blow rang out long and hollow. Something beneath the surface turned over, slow as a cart wheel, and lifted a head through the broken sheet. Its jaw was crusted with reeds, its horns furred with pale moss, and its eyes were the colour of wet slate. It did not roar. It asked, in a voice like water running through a culvert, what she wanted with its sleep.

Agnes did not lie to it. She told it about the ewes, the lambs due within the fortnight, and her father's back, which had gone to nothing since the autumn. The dragon listened with its claws resting on the ice, each one curved like a sickle and leaving a white scratch where it touched. When she was done, it said the mere would open for her flock if she gave it the first lamb born on the new grass. Agnes thought of her father's hands on the crook and said she would give it a lamb, but not the first, and not the best. The whiskers lifted at that, and it laughed like a sluice gate going up.

Spring came up the valley in a week of rain. The ice went grey, then gone, and the trough filled with brown water. On the first morning of lambing, Agnes found a ewe at the water's edge with a single lamb already dry beside her, and a long wet furrow in the reeds where something had slid back under. She never told her father whose lamb it had been. She only said the mere had been kinder than she expected, and that the dragon kept its word in its own way, which was by keeping its distance.