Black and grey pencil drawing of a Japanese-style dragon design with a spiked mane, scaled body and clawed foot, shown as a flash sketch.

Dragon design with spiked mane and claws

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and grey drawing of a dragon head with a spiked mane, horns and bared fangs, its scaled body coiling down the right side to a clawed foot. The linework is fine and dense, with cross-hatched shading on the scales and mane and sweeping dark streaks that suggest motion behind the figure. The sketch is monochrome on a pale background, with no body placement shown.

Japanese Dragon Scale Claw Mane Horn Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pumps had been dead three days when Mary Pascoe went down the shaft with a lamp in one hand and a bad temper in the other. Below the ninth level the water lay black and still, and something moved under it, long and slow, the way an eel moves when it thinks no one is watching. She had heard the old men talk of the thing in the drowned gallery, the one that came with the spring tides, took a mule once and a boy once, and gave back nothing but its shed scales, grey as slate and as sharp.

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She did not go looking for it. She went for the cutting bar Harry had left by the winch, because the copper vein would not wait on a creature's moods. The rope creaked. The lamp shook. Halfway along the gallery a ridge rose out of the water, spined like a saw, then a head the size of a wheelbarrow, eyes like wet coal, its mane lifting in a slow fan of spikes. It did not roar. It breathed out, and the cold came off it in a sheet that frosted the glass of her lamp.

"You've been robbing my roof for forty years," it said, in a voice like stones rolling in a tin bucket. "Dig where I sleep and you pay in something." Mary had buried two husbands' worth of debts and one husband, and she was not frightened of a lizard with opinions. "Then sleep somewhere else," she said. "I'll pay you in candles."

The dragon laughed, which was worse than the breath. It took the whole box of candles and coiled itself out through the flooded level towards the sea, a long dark wave of scale and talon. Next morning the pumps started on their own. The copper came up bright as a new penny, and someone hung a single shed scale on a nail by the headframe to keep the bad luck off. Mary never said whether she had made the bargain, only that the candles were overpriced.