Full back tattoo in Japanese style showing a green dragon and an orange tiger among pink cherry blossoms and clouds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragon and tiger back piece with blossoms

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large back piece shows a green dragon coiling across the upper back and a striped orange tiger crouched across the centre and lower back. Cherry blossoms and grey cloud shapes fill the background, with bold black outlines and smooth colour shading. Strong reds, oranges and greens dominate the composition, which spans the whole back.

Japanese Back Dragon Tiger Cherry blossom Cloud Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry at Kessen Reach had not carried a passenger in nine years, so when the grey boat knocked against the pilings that spring, Old Ansel dropped his net and stared. A woman stepped off with a copper box under one arm and a cough like loose gravel. She asked the way to the orchard. He told her it was the same way it had always been: up through the cloud bank, past the stone that hummed in the wind, then wait for the dragon to decide whether you were worth the trouble.

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She climbed anyway. The cherry trees along the path were heavy with pink, and every few hundred steps the cloud came down so thick she could not see her own boots. Something moved above her, a long green body turning over itself, scales like wet leaves. Lower on the slope a striped shape lay with its chin on its paws, eyes the colour of old brass. The dragon and the tiger had guarded the orchard since before the river changed course, and every autumn they fought until the bark split and the petals drifted down the hill.

She set the box down between them. Inside were seeds, the last of a grafting line lost when the old world ended, and she had walked a long way to find the one place the trees might still take. The dragon lowered its head until its whiskers brushed the lid. The tiger sniffed the box and sneezed. Neither spoke, and for a long time the only sound was the wind moving through the blossoms.

In the morning the two beasts lay side by side, tail curled over tail, and the woman was pressing the first seed into the cloud-soft earth. Ansel said later that the dragon had laughed at her, the tiger had licked her hand, and the fallen petals had settled in a pattern like a map of the river. Nobody in the valley had seen them quarrel since. They still watch the ridge, and the woman still comes up each spring with a basket.