Black linework flash of an Eastern-style dragon coiling through clouds, a design suited to a Japanese style back or sleeve tattoo.

Eastern dragon with clouds

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a long, serpentine dragon with flowing whiskers, horns and mane, coiling diagonally across the page with clawed feet extended. Fine scale patterns, wave-like flames and swirling cloud shapes fill the body and surrounding space. The image is solid black outline on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Japanese Dragon Cloud Flame Scale Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawser parted on the third bend below Sallow Lock, and by the time the bow swung wide you were already on the cabin roof with the splicing fid between your teeth. Nobody else aboard the Pale Heron was awake. Nell had gone below with the lantern, and the old engine was muttering to itself the way it did when the river thickened with fog.

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Nell's grandfather used to say the Sallow ran over a sleeping dragon, and that every flood was the beast turning over in its bed. You had laughed at that when you were twelve. Now the water beneath the hull rose in long grey coils, scaled with ripples, and the mist lifted off the weir in curling shapes like cloud painted on silk with a single stroke of ink. Flames of spray broke against the bank and sank back down.

The rope was frayed at the eye, so you cut it clean and worked the strands back together, counting over and under while the barge drifted sideways towards the bridge piers. Something long slid beneath the keel. It did not push. It lifted, gently, the way a hand lifts a sleeping child from a bath, and the boat came level on the current with the bank sliding away.

When the splice held you stood up with salt on your lips. The mist had settled over the bow in soft folds, pale against the dark. Below, Nell called out half asleep, asking whether the river had let them go. You told her yes. You did not mention the great head that had turned in the water to watch you tie the knot.