Black and grey Japanese style leg sleeve on a seated person, with a hannya mask on the calf and a scaled creature with fangs across the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hannya mask and clouds leg sleeve

Japanese · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A seated person shows a full leg sleeve, with a hannya style mask on the lower leg surrounded by swirling clouds and wispy linework. The upper thigh carries a scaled creature with bared fangs, shaded in fine hatching. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black ink and grey shading against a white padded table.

Japanese Thigh Calf Cloud Scale Fangs Dragon Swirl Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's going and I'll not shout over it. You want the dragon? Everyone in Hollin Bank wants the dragon, and nobody wants to be the one who goes down the Coldharbour shaft after it. So listen. Old Tobias Rudd went down in the spring of the wet year, with a candle, a pick and a heel of bread, because the seam had thinned to nothing and the foreman swore there was more coal past the fall.

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Down at the face the air went cold as a churchyard, and the rock began to breathe. Tobias said the walls were scaled like a trout's back, grey ridges rising in rows, and when his candle guttered they seemed to glow faintly at their edges, like cloud with the moon behind it. Then something beneath the seam opened its jaws. He saw the teeth first, longer than his forearm and curved back like sickles. Behind them, in the dark, was a face that was no beast's face at all, all brow and cheek and bitter mouth, the sort of mask they hang in the chapel to keep the drink out.

He didn't run. He sat down on the wet floor and told it about his daughter's bread, about the boots he had mended and the boy he had lost to the firedamp the winter before. The mask listened. Smoke came out of its mouth and climbed the shaft, rolling and curling until it hung over the pithead like a fleece, and the men above swore the rain stopped for a week.

Tobias came up at dawn with his bread uneaten and the seam full of coal. The dragon never came back, though they say the mask keeps the lower galleries still, and when you hear a knock from under the floorboards you leave something on the step, a crust and a candle end, and you say thank you. Now finish your tea. The lamp is going out.