Black and grey Japanese-style dragon design with cream flame highlights, coiling across a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey dragon with flames design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A coiling dragon with a long, scaled body, clawed feet and a horned head with open jaws and whiskers. The linework is defined and the scales and claws are shaded in grey, with cream and pale gold highlights on the flames and dragon's head. The design is centred on a plain white background.

Japanese Dragon Flame Claw Scale Horn Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the Lantern Rooms flooded, Mei Ling Crane was the only one who kept dancing. Water came under the doors of the Mariner's Ballroom in Hull like it had been invited, and the band kept playing Glenn Miller with their trousers rolled to the knee. I was nineteen, cloakroom girl, and I had a ticket stub in my fist for a waltz I'd never danced.

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She had come in from the rain with a grey silk coat and a face like weather. Nobody asked where she'd been. She simply took my hand across the parquet, which was lifting at the seams, and told me to count with her and not to look down. Her shoes were black and her steps were slow, and every turn she made seemed to pull something up off the floor behind her, a curl of mist that hung at the ceiling and knotted itself into clouds above the chandeliers.

By the third number the water was at our ankles and the mist had gone gold along its edges, like a lamp was burning somewhere inside it. I saw the shape in it then, long and scaled, a body turning slowly through the dark over the bandstand, claws spread, mouth open as if it was laughing or about to speak. Mei Ling only tipped her head back and smiled at it, the way you'd smile at an old friend who had come to collect her.

The water went out with the tide before dawn. The hall was dry, the band had gone home, and the parquet lay flat as a plate. Nobody else believed me. But on my wrist, where the stub had left a damp blue mark, there was a small grey scale, and when I turned my hand under the lamp it caught the light like a coin.