Flash design of a red, orange and yellow Japanese-style dragon coiling through black clouds, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese dragon among clouds and flames

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A dragon with a horned head, open jaws, whiskers and clawed feet curls across the sheet, its body outlined in heavy black lines and filled with pale grey-white scales. Orange and red flames trail from its head and tail, set against stylised black and grey clouds. The design is shown flat on a plain white background, with the dragon filling most of the frame.

Japanese Dragon Cloud Flame Scale Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third month without rain, Old Tomoe had stopped counting the bowls of millet she set on the step, because the sparrows had stopped coming for them. Her grandson Kenji spent his afternoons lying on the dry earth beside the well, talking down into it as if someone were listening.

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On the forty-second day the cloud came over the ridge the wrong way, rolling uphill against the wind, and something uncoiled inside it. It was longer than the temple roof, grey-white and scaled like river stones, with whiskers that trailed behind it like smoke. Flames ran off its horns and along its back without scorching the grass beneath. Kenji said it looked hungry. Tomoe said it looked tired, and she was right, because when it settled its claws over the rim of the well, the old wood groaned under the weight.

'I climbed too high after the summer storms,' it said, in a voice like a bell struck underwater. 'The sky forgot my name, and the rain forgot to follow me down. Who keeps a dragon's name these days?' Tomoe fetched the lacquer tray her husband had painted with clouds, set it on the step, and told the dragon that the village still did. The dragon laughed, a sound that shook loose dust from the eaves, and lowered its head into the water.

By morning the well had risen to the lip of the stone, and the cloud had slid back over the ridge with its flames banked low. Kenji found a single orange scale on the step, warm as a coal. He threaded it onto a cord and wore it under his collar, and when the sparrows returned, Tomoe pretended not to notice him scattering extra millet on the rim of the well.