Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eastern dragon with swirling clouds

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A long, serpentine Eastern dragon with a whiskered head, horns and flowing mane coils vertically down the composition. Detailed outlines and scale patterning define the body, while swirling cloud motifs and wispy, flame-like tail details surround it. The design is shown in black ink on a plain white background.

Japanese Dragon Cloud Scale Whiskers Horn Mane Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came down the valley the week after the river stopped, and my mother said it was only weather. She was wrong about that, as she was about most things she said with her chin up. I was eleven and I had been sent to the top of the lane with a bucket and a message for the Pang brothers, who kept the mill and were not speaking to anyone. Instead I stood on the stones of the old well and watched a long grey shape lift itself out of the clouds above the reservoir, whiskers trailing like wet rope, its mane lifting in a wind that did not reach the ground.

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It did not eat anyone. It went down into the dry reservoir bed where the cracked mud curled up like pastry, and it lay there with its belly in the dirt and its tail still hanging over the cloud banks. Mr Pang the elder came out with a lamp, though it was daylight, and asked it politely what it wanted. The dragon said nothing. It only turned its great horned head and looked at the mill, and then at the bucket in my hand, and then at the sky, which had begun to darken in small, careful swirls, the way milk does when you stir it with a spoon.

We had been arguing for a year about whose water it was. Nobody thought to ask whose sky it was. I poured what was left in my bucket onto the mud, which was foolish, and the dragon breathed out through its nostrils and the clouds came down over the reservoir in ringed curls, each one pressing softly against the next. By evening the bed was a lake again, shallow and silver. The Pang brothers still did not speak to each other, but they stood together on the bank and watched the rain come, and nobody had to carry a bucket anywhere for a long while after.