Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eastern dragon with a flaming pearl

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A coiling Eastern dragon with a detailed scaled body, clawed feet, spiky fins and a whiskered head fills the sheet. Dense hatching and fine stippling create shading across the scales and body, while flame-like wisps curl around a shaded orb held in the dragon's claws. The drawing is in black and grey on a pale, slightly sepia background, with the dragon arranged diagonally to fill the frame.

Japanese Dragon Claw Scale Flame Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The galley fire had gone out in the middle watch, and rain came sideways through the hatch as if it had business below. Cook Mabb crouched at the cold range with a tin of sodden biscuit and no matches that would strike. On the shelf above the flour sat the pearl the Canton merchant had given her for a debt nobody remembered. It was the size of a plum and the colour of skimmed milk, and when she tipped it into her palm it was warm.

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Her grandmother had told her the old tale the way one states the price of salt. A dragon lived under the sea and kept a pearl that burned. It held the pearl in its claws because only something that cannot burn can hold a flame, and a dragon's claws were the one thing the sea could not scorch. Each night the dragon turned the pearl, and the fire rolled off it in long curls, which is why the water sometimes glowed green at the edges of a storm. A man who stole the pearl would be chased to the ends of the water. A cook who asked nicely might borrow a little flame.

Mabb set the pearl on the cold iron, said the words her grandmother had said, and climbed the ladder to the deck, where lightning showed the sea rising in black ridges. She saw no dragon at first, only wisps of fire lifting off the water and curling along the rail, licking the wet boards. Then she saw it coiled round the mainmast like a rope someone had forgotten to stow, one whiskered eye fixed on her, its claws holding a glow the size of a lantern.

Below, the stove roared up. She dried three hundred biscuits, and the crew ate them hot and cursing. Next morning the pearl sat cool on the shelf, and beside it lay a single scale the length of her thumb, pale as a fingernail. She kept it in the tin with the pearl and never told the captain why the stove did not go out again.