Black and grey Japanese style dragon with red and white cherry blossoms tattooed along the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and cherry blossoms on ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey dragon with shaded scales and fine linework wraps up the side of the ribcage, its head resting near the upper ribs. Red and pink cherry blossoms accent the head and coils, with white and grey blossoms lower down the design. A wall of tattoo flash designs fills the background, and the bare midriff and navel piercing appear at the edge of the frame.

Japanese Ribs Dragon Cherry blossom Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are halfway through a quickstep at the Carrow Bay Palais when the mural above the bandstand stops being paint. The dragon has coiled along the rafters since the Coronation, and tonight its head slides past the balcony rail, scales catching the glitter ball's light, whiskers trailing like wet rope. Your partner, Walter, keeps counting under his breath, one two three, quick quick slow, and does not look up.

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Nobody else on the floor seems to notice. Mrs Pell, who runs the lessons from a stool beside the cloakroom, notices and presses a folded paper fan into your hand, its spine printed with cherry blossom. "It wants a partner," she says. "It has wanted one since your mother gave up the Thursday class." You tell her you have two left feet and a bad knee. She says the dragon has never once cared about feet.

The band slides into a waltz, and the dragon lowers one coil so gently that Walter steps onto it as if onto a stair. It lifts him off the boards, sets him down by the fire door, and brushes him with petals from the branches now pushing through the ceiling plaster. Then it turns its great head to you, eyes like banked coals, and waits.

You take the offered claw. It leads you round the floor in long, unhurried circles, and the petals fall on everyone's shoulders without anyone brushing them off. When the last chord fades, a single pink petal stays on your palm. Looking back at the wall, you see the dragon painted again, though now a new blossom curls beside its ear, and Walter is dancing with Mrs Pell by the cloakroom, counting out loud.