Black line drawing of a Japanese-style dragon coiling upward beside a flaming pearl, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and flaming pearl line drawing

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a long, serpentine dragon with a whiskered head, clawed feet and a wind-swept mane of spikes. The dragon's body is filled with scale patterns and it curls around a swirling flaming pearl on the right. The design is shown in line only, on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Japanese Dragon Scale Claw Whiskers Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Shenmu had been dry for three summers when the boy Lu Feng climbed down to the cracked mud and found the pearl. It sat in a hollow of the bank, glowing faintly through its own skin of smoke, and when he touched it the heat ran up his arm like a struck bell. He carried it home in his shirt, though it scorched a brown patch over his ribs that never faded.

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His grandmother did not scold him. She sat on the step, shelling beans into a bowl, and listened to the whole story before she spoke. Then she told him that the dragon who lived under the water had been sleeping since the rains stopped, and that a pearl taken from a sleeper's bed was a debt. Every creature of the valley would pay it in turn, one by one, until the thing was returned to the place it was taken from.

So Lu Feng went back down, past the reeds, past the drowned sluice gate, and set the pearl in the mud where he had found it. He waited. The air grew thick and the wind came up out of the gorge, lifting the dust into long grey spirals. Something vast uncoiled beneath the surface, scales clicking like dry seeds, and a whiskered head rose from the channel with its mouth open, teeth bright as sickles, and looked at the boy for a long time.

The rain came that night. In the morning the river ran brown and loud past the willows, and Lu Feng's grandmother said nothing about the debt, only handed him a bowl of beans and told him to eat before the water rose.