Black and grey Japanese style dragon tattoo with peony flowers wrapping around the side of a thigh and hip.

Dragon and peonies on a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon winds up the side of the thigh and hip, with its head near the hip and its tail curling towards the knee, surrounded by several peony flowers. The linework is bold and dark, with scale and shading detail on the dragon's body and softer, lighter outlines on the peonies. The tattoo is in black and grey ink against plain skin, with a soft indoor background.

Japanese Thigh Dragon Peony Flower Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon had slept under the peony beds of Mori Hollow for so long that the gardeners stopped sweeping its scales from the stone path. Every spring the blooms opened in heavy pink rounds, and every spring old Haruka Ito carried her kettle down the steps to sit beside the wall where the beast lay coiled. She talked to it about the weather, her son in the city, and the price of rice, and the dragon listened with one eye half open.

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That April a surveyor came up the valley with a rolled plan and a length of red string tied to his wrist. He pegged the hillside, counted the flower beds, and said the whole slope would be a car park by autumn. Haruka said nothing. She poured him tea in the bowl with the chipped rim, and he drank it because he was thirsty, and while he drank the dragon lifted its head from the wall and breathed a thin grey cloud over the plan until the ink ran off the paper like rain.

The surveyor shouted, then sat down on the wall without meaning to. The dragon told him, in a voice like wet gravel, that a garden is not land until someone has been sorry to leave it. Then it asked what he would miss if the peonies were gone. He thought of his grandmother's hands in a garden he had forgotten he had, and found he could not answer, and the dragon said that was the answer.

He walked back down the valley without his plan. Haruka's kettle still sat warm on the step. In the morning the peonies had opened so wide their petals lay across the path like a rug, and the dragon's tail was curled around the last pale bloom as carefully as a child holds a cup.