Japanese style dragon with cherry blossoms and grey smoke tattooed across the top of a foot and up the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and cherry blossoms on a foot

Japanese · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A dark grey dragon with red-banded body and a red-and-grey head curls across the top of the foot, with pink cherry blossoms and green leaves along a branch that climbs towards the ankle. Bold black outlines and soft grey shading create smoke-like clouds behind the design. Colour appears in the red, pink, green and yellow details against the skin, and the design follows the curve of the foot.

Japanese Ankle Dragon Cherry blossom Flower Branch Smoke Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon had slept in the hollow above Marrow Cross for three winters, and the village had learned to live around its breathing. Smoke rose from a crack in the hill, grey and slow as breath off a horse on a frost morning, and children were told to keep below the old cherry tree when the wind turned. That spring the tree flowered anyway, pink as the inside of a shell, and Hannah Dunmore climbed it with shears to cut a branch for her mother's wake.

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The dragon woke as she reached the third bough. It did not roar. It unwound along the slope the way a river finds its bed, its body banded red where old fire had scorched the scales, and it regarded her with an eye the colour of wet slate. "You have come for the flowers," it said. "Everyone comes for the flowers. Nobody asks what they cost the root."

Hannah had been raised to answer plainly. "My mother is dead, and the wake wants something that will not wilt before dusk." The dragon considered this for the length of one long exhale, and the smoke it let go curled round her ankles and left them warm. "Then take one bloom," it said, "and every spring after, bring one back to this stone. The tree will not forgive a gardener who only takes." She broke a single blossom from the bough, and the tree did not so much as shiver.

She went down the hill with the flower pinned in her coat. Forty years later the village still kept wide of the hollow, but there was always a small heap of petals on the flat stone each April, and the smoke that rose from the crack curled round them as gently as a hand smoothing a child's hair.