Black and grey dragon tattoo across the upper back with Chinese characters above and below, shown on a woman with her hand raised to her head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and characters down a woman's back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's bare back is shown with her head turned away and her hand raised to her head, so no face is visible. A coiling dragon in grey ink runs down the centre of the back, with vertical Chinese characters placed above and below it. The soft lighting and dark backdrop with faint patterned motifs keep the focus on the tattoo and the skin tones.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Sefa, the rains came early to Ondhara this year and the lacquer shops on the Weeping Stair have shuttered. Master Ilen has finally agreed to let me grind the grey ink myself, though he watched every spoonful as if I might steal the river from it.

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The ink is soot from burnt willow, bound with clay scraped from under the bridge at Tamsin Ford. He says a dragon drawn in it must never be lifted from the page, one unbroken stroke from tail to crown, or the beast will climb back out of the paper at night. I laughed. He did not. Yesterday a courier from the royal scribes brought a commission: a dragon for a widow's back, with two characters above and two below it to say what she would not say aloud. Ilen handed me the brush and said the characters were mine to choose.

I chose the signs for keep and for the long way round. Not a lovely pair, I know, but the widow had asked for something true. I wrote them twice on scrap, then the dragon, which took the whole morning and most of the stone-ground ink. When I lifted the brush at the tail there was a faint grey hair of a line left behind, and Ilen swore that the beast had got out after all.

The courier came back at dusk with a coin and a message from the widow's house, asking which way the dragon was facing. I told him it was going down, toward the sea. Ilen says that is the right way for a dragon to face when it has been kept too long. Write soon. Bring me the good brushes and some of that clay from the ford, and do not let the rain take your letter.

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