Man with a full back tattoo of green dragons, grey clouds and a cross, with blackletter lettering across the lower back and sleeve tattoos on his upper arms.

Japanese back piece with dragons and clouds

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows two coiled dragons flanking a central cross-like figure, set among grey wash clouds and pale flowers. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft grey shading in the clouds and greens and reds in the dragons. Black blackletter lettering across the lower back reads LINKIN PARK, and the subject is photographed against a dark red wall with his head bowed and arms raised.

Japanese Lettering Back Upper arm Dragon Cloud Cross Figure Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cross-frame kite had been sitting on the rafters of the Hayashi workshop for three days before anyone thought to ask what it was for. Tomi had split the bamboo so fine it bent like wet hair, and her father had papered it in the grey wash of a rainy morning, then painted two green dragons along the lower edges to keep it from looking too pale. The villagers had ordered festival kites. They had not ordered a thing that looked like a doorway with its arms flung wide.

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The drought had been on the hills since spring, and the two dragons who lived in the harbour had been quarrelling for weeks over the one cloud that kept drifting back and forth between their rocks, each swearing it had been promised to him. Tomi's grandmother told her that a kite carrying both their colours would make them look up, and whoever looked up first would have to share. Tomi thought this was the kind of thing old women said to children with sulky faces. She tied the string anyway and carried the kite down to the sea wall at dusk, with the pale painted flowers folded against her chest like letters.

The wind came from the east an hour after the lanterns were lit, smelling of salt and something green. The kite lifted, the string began to sing, and the clouds she had brushed around its arms swelled and rolled as though they had been waiting to be called. Down in the harbour, two coiled shapes raised their heads at the same moment and turned their faces to the sky.

Nobody in the village agreed afterwards on what happened next, but the rain came before the lanterns burned low, and by morning someone had painted TOMI in fresh black letters along the spine of the kite. Her father swore he had not done it. Neither had she.