Flash sheet of bold black Japanese-style dragons and kanji characters labelled wealth, wisdom and love, with small red accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dragons and kanji flash sheet

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A flash sheet showing two black dragons with curling bodies and clawed feet, plus three large kanji characters, each labelled in red italic script as wealth, wisdom and love. The linework is bold and solid, with dense black fill and minimal shading. Small red details on the dragon eyes and labels add colour to an otherwise black design, arranged in a loose grid across the sheet.

Japanese Dragon Kanji Love Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold still, the pair of you, and mind the lamp, because I will not tell this twice once the kettle's on. Two dragons lived in the cut below Hollin Lock, black as coal-tar and twice as long as this boat. The upper one had red eyes and a voice like a gate hinge, and it kept wealth buried in the silt where no one ever thought to dig. The lower one was quieter. It kept wisdom, and it would only give it away to someone who asked the right question twice.

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A lock-keeper's daughter called Nell Brindle came down to the water one March with a sack of rusted tins and a debt her father could not pay. She did not want gold. She asked the upper dragon what it would take to cross the weir, and it laughed so hard the reeds bent flat. Wealth, it said, was only mud that people agreed to call gold. Go home, Nell.

She went to the lower dragon instead, which was the wiser choice, though she did not know it yet. It said nothing for a whole week. Then one evening, when the lamps came on along the towpath, it curled its long body round her sad little boat and asked what she loved so much she would sit in the cold for it. Nell thought of her father's hands on the gate paddles, cracked and patient, and she told the dragon so. It lowered its head, and the three marks painted on the lock gate began to glow like coals.

Her father never did learn why the debt was forgiven, and I have never told him. The boat's still moored at Hollin, mind, and if you look down past the weed on a still morning you'll see the shape of them, black on the green. Now bed. Wisdom's a slow thing, and so is sleep.