Japanese style flash drawing of a green and red dragon coiling over black and grey waves, with a small cartoon figure in a yellow robe beside it.

Green dragon flash with wave background

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A full colour drawing of a green dragon with red spines, yellow claws and a red-striped body, coiling up the left side of the sheet. Bold black outlines, white highlights and scale patterns define the linework, and the dragon sits against black and grey wave and cloud shapes. A small cartoon figure in a yellow robe, holding a large calligraphy character on its head, appears to the lower right.

Japanese Traditional Dragon Wave Cloud Calligraphy Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo had been sent to repaint the dragon on the sideshow booth before the fair opened in Lincolnshire, and she had until the lights came on at seven. The old backdrop had split along a seam, and the green dragon had lost one of its red spines to a winter of damp. Her uncle Tobias had painted it forty years ago, back when the fair travelled on four lorries and the generator coughed like a sick ram.

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She worked from his sketchbook, which smelled of linseed and tobacco. The wave behind the dragon was the hardest part, black and grey curls that had to look like they were breaking rather than sitting flat on the board. The little bald sage in the corner, the one with a calligraphy character balanced on his head like a parcel, kept grinning up at her from the foot of the page. Tobias used to say the old man was the only honest thing on the booth, because he was the only one who knew the joke.

At dusk a boy from the dodgems asked what the character meant. She said she didn't know, which was true, and he said it looked like a worm wearing a hat. She laughed, then found a stub of paper tucked inside the back cover with the same character in pencil, and beneath it in Tobias's cramped hand: for whoever paints the scales after me. Keep the wave moving.

She climbed the ladder, mixed the green until it matched the scales under the lamplight, and painted the last spine red. When the gates opened, the dragon looked as if it had been lying in wait all winter and had only now decided to uncoil. Nobody noticed the new spine. Tobias would have, she thought, and she left the brush drying across the tin.