Full-colour Japanese style dragon design with green scales, red fins and clouds on black, shown as a flash drawing with no body placement visible.

Green and red dragon design with wind chime

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A green dragon with yellow whiskers and flared red fins coils down the right side of the image, its head at upper left. The design uses bold black outlines, layered scale patterns, grey cloud shapes and black background shading. Beside the dragon sits a small drawn wind chime with a hanging strip bearing a single black Japanese character on a white ground.

Japanese Dragon Cloud Scale Whiskers Claw Kanji

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chime-maker Haru kept her shop at the foot of the Kurama road, where the afternoon wind came down off the hills and rang every tin and bell in the street. So when the green dragon Tomeki came down through a grey bank of cloud one July, complaining that the valley had gone quiet, she was not surprised. The river had been dammed that spring, the frogs had stopped their evening racket, and even the bamboo had forgotten how to knock together. Tomeki's whiskers drooped like wet rope. He wanted something that would sing for him whenever he passed.

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Haru took down a bell of pale glass from the shelf, streaked red where the glaze had run in the kiln, and hung it from a green cord. Beneath it she tied a narrow strip of paper and brushed a single character on it in black ink, the word for stillness, because she had learned long ago that a chime only speaks when something holds still enough to hear it. Tomeki snorted at the paper and asked why a bell needed a word. Haru only shrugged and told him to try it.

He flew off in a rush and the bell rang so sharply that three crows left the roof of the temple. Then he came back, hovering over the shop with his fins flared, and found that the bell had gone silent the moment he arrived. Each time he darted past, the glass stayed dumb. Only when he folded his claws and settled on the warm stones of the wall, tail curled, breathing slow as the river, did the chime begin to speak. It rang one clear note, then another, and the frogs answered from the reeds below.

Tomeki stayed on that wall until the sun dropped behind the hills. Haru swept her step and counted the notes, and she thought that the dragon had come looking for a voice when all he had needed was a reason to stop.