Green dragon tattoo with black outlines and shaded scales on the side of a hip and waist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green dragon on a hip

Japanese · Other · Colour · Photo

A green eastern-style dragon coils up the side of the torso, with its head near the ribs and its tail curling towards the hip. The scales are shaded in green with bright highlights, and dark outlines define the body, claws and spines. The tightly framed photograph shows hands resting on a studded belt at the lower edge.

Japanese Other Dragon Scale Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan, the boat is called the Verity Lane now, though you would not know her from the quay. Skipper had the old name scraped off the bow at Lowestoft and Danny Riordan painted over it in a green so dark it looks black until the lamp catches it. Then he added the dragon. Nobody asked him to. He went up the side on a bosun's chair with a tin of gloss and a brush no wider than a pencil, and by the time the tide turned the thing was coiled round the wheelhouse door as if the yard had launched her with it.

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It is the scales that get you. Each one is edged in gold where the light hits, and the spines along its back are picked out in the same gold, so when we run north in the dark the boys swear it shifts. Mrs Okonkwo at the chandlers said it was bad luck to put a dragon on a boat without giving it a name. We have not named it. Skipper says it is only paint, and that a dragon is a sort of weather, and you do not argue with weather.

Last Thursday the net came up fouled with a length of old rope, and under the rope was a conger the colour of pond weed, coiled up tight as if it had been waiting for us. Danny laughed until he coughed. I stood at the rail looking at the dragon's tail curling over the gunwale and thought of you saying the sea keeps whatever it likes and gives back only what it is done with.

Send the wool socks with the next post. I am keeping this short because the skipper is shouting for the hatch. Your loving grandson, Tomasz.