Black and grey shaded Japanese-style dragon tattoo with scaled body and clawed feet, coiling down a calf.

Eastern dragon coiled down a lower leg

Japanese · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon with horns, whiskers and a long spined body winds vertically down the limb, with clawed feet and a tail reaching toward the bottom of the frame. The linework is bold and dark, with scales and body stripes built up using grey shading to give depth. The tattoo is entirely black and grey against lightly tanned skin, and the composition fills the frame centrally.

Japanese Calf Dragon Scale Claw Horn Whiskers Tail

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are told to paint the dragon's stripes last, after the scales, because the ink must dry between them. Brother Ansel watches from the cloister step with his sleeves rolled, saying nothing while you work the fine brush down the length of the body. The wall is limewash, and the dragon has been there since before the roof was re-tiled, its horned head over the gate and its tail lost somewhere behind the bell tower.

Keep reading

By the third evening your scales match the old ones, but the stripes do not. Each time you lay one down, the grey bleeds into the shadow beside it, and the creature looks heavier, as if something has been fed. You mention this to the cook, who shrugs over her pot of barley and says the novices have always been told to leave the stripes to the dragon.

On the last night you climb the scaffold with a lamp and find the wall already darker than you left it. Every stripe you painted has been gone over in a second, steadier hand. At the tail, where your paint was thinnest, someone has written your name in the old script, small and neat, beneath a single claw that seems to have closed around the lamp's shadow, as though it had been waiting for you to sign.