Pen drawing of a tattoo design on a woman's torso in a bikini, showing a Japanese style dragon and mermaid along the ribs and hip.

Dragon and mermaid design on a torso

Japanese · Ribs · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink pen drawing of a woman's torso in a bikini, with a tattoo design running down the side from the ribs towards the hip. The design shows a dragon with a open mouth and a mermaid with flowing hair, surrounded by scattered cherry blossoms. The linework is bold and dense with hatching and stippling in the scales, and the image is in monochrome on a cream background.

Japanese Ribs Dragon Mermaid Cherry blossom Woman Bikini Torso Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The petals came in on the tide the week the Maud Ellery went down off the Nab, pale and salt-soaked, and Old Sarn would not let anyone sweep them from the slipway. He stood on the wet stone with his cap in his fist and watched them turn in the eddy by the steps, as if waiting for instructions.

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Under the breakwater lived a dragon that the harbour had long agreed not to mention. It was grey-green and crusted with scales like barnacles, and it ate nothing but the herring that ran in October, so the boats came in lean every autumn. Out past the pilings, on the flat rock where the gulls fought, sat Wenna, who had hair the colour of wet kelp and a tail that flashed when she turned. She was the only one who spoke to the dragon, and she spoke to it the way you would speak to a cross uncle.

That spring the dragon rose at the top of the slip with its jaws wide and a thread of steam curling from its teeth. Doors slammed up and down the quay. Sarn did not run. He knelt, gathered the blossom in both palms, and held them out. Wenna called across the water that the petals had come from a tree on an island the dragon had once flown over, and that it had been searching the tide for them ever since. The great head lowered until its breath lifted the hair from Sarn's forehead. It took the petals from his hands with a tongue as soft as sailcloth, closed its mouth, and sank back under the breakwater without a ripple.

The herring came in thick that October, and the next, and for as long as anyone could remember, the bay flushed faintly pink on the first warm day of April. Sarn's grandson swore he saw the dragon's scales catch the colour as it turned beneath the boats. Wenna, when asked, only laughed and said the petals had always been going home.