Large Japanese-style dragon tattoo in grey shading with red flowers and falling petals, across a person's thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and red blossoms on a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large dragon with a scaled body, clawed feet and a whiskered head wraps across the outer thigh and hip. Its body is built from grey shading and fine linework, with red flowers and loose petals scattered around it. Colour is limited to the red blossoms against the grey dragon, and a gloved hand and a blue wrap are visible near the tattoo, suggesting it may be in progress.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the cut is still high from the rain, but Dad would not let me take the Greta through the lock until the blossom on the cabin side was finished. He says a dragon wants flowers near it or it gets restless. I told him dragons on the Grand Union get restless anyway, which is why the lock-keeper carries a windlass like a cosh. He laughed, which he hasn't done since Mum.

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The dragon itself he has been working on since March, a grey-green thing coiled from the chimney down to the tiller, every scale picked out with a sharpened nail and a pot of soot. Mr Okonedo from the boatyard says it is the finest painting he has seen on a working boat. To me it looks as though it is trying to crawl off into the water. Dad said that was the point. A river dragon belongs to the river.

Today the petals came off. Thirty red blossoms, each dabbed on with cherry lacquer, and then a gust came down off Tring cutting and tore six of them into the canal. I fished them out with the boathook, sodden and bright as pennies. Dad sat on the gunwale and said nothing for a long while.

Tonight I pinned the wet ones to the line above the stove to dry. Dad is asleep with the lamp still lit. In the morning I'll tell him the dragon has turned its head a little towards the bow, because I'm nearly certain it has, and he'll say it's only the light.

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