Colour Japanese-style dragon tattoo with green scales and wave details on the side of a person's torso, above the waistband of their jeans.

Green dragon tattoo on the side of the torso

Japanese · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A green and teal dragon with a pale, shaded head and fine outlines curls across the side of the torso, with its body trailing up towards the ribs. Wave-like swirls in blue and green sit beneath it, and warm orange accents appear along the dragon's fins and claws. The photo is taken straight on at waist height, with the subject's white crop top and jeans framing the tattoo.

Japanese Ribs Dragon Wave Water Scale Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the stove, and don't touch the brass, it bites in January. Aye, that's the lamp. My father kept it before me, and his father before him, and the sea came up to the bottom step in the winter of the great gale, so you'll forgive me if I talk over the wind.

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The thing that came up out of the water that night wasn't a boat, nor a whale, nor any honest fish. It was green as bottle glass, with a head like a plough and a beard that streamed out behind it in the foam. My father swore there was a mane of weed along its back, every frond the colour of a wet pine needle. It came round the rocks below the tower and looked up at the lamp the way a cat watches a bird through a window.

Now here is the part I'd have you remember. It didn't smash the tower. It coiled its long body through the surf, lifting the swell into curls of blue and teal, and it laid its claws on the rock, orange at the tips like coals kept under ash. My father had the nerve to ask what it wanted. It answered in a voice like shingle dragging back down the beach that it had come to see whether the light still burned. Nobody had climbed up to trim that wick for a hundred years.

So he climbed the stairs, trimmed the wick until the flame roared, and the dragon sank back under the swell with a sound like a bell rung underwater. Next morning the boats came in safe, the pale scratches of its claws were still on the rock, and my father never once lit the lamp without leaving a drop of oil on the step for it. Mind your cup now. That's the whole of it, and the tide's turning.