Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a grey dragon with red stripes and cherry blossom branches across the top of a foot and ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese dragon and cherry blossom on a foot

Japanese · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A grey, red-striped dragon coils from the ankle across the top of the foot, with its head near the toes. Pink and red cherry blossoms with green leaves sit along the dragon's body, and soft grey smoke-like shading surrounds the design. The bold outlines and solid fills are shown in a close, slightly angled shot on a light blue surface.

Japanese Ankle Dragon Cherry blossom Flower Leaves Smoke Cloud Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon had not been seen since the spring the weir broke, so when Tomoko Ishii walked into the Kiku teahouse for the thirtieth reunion, the first thing anyone asked was whether she had brought it back with her. She laughed and said she had only brought blossom, a sprig of it in a jam jar wrapped in wet cloth, carried all the way from the old schoolyard.

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Long ago, the grey dragon of the Ota river lived in the deep pool below the school. Its body was striped red like a fire-bellied newt, and wherever it coiled, smoke rose off the water and hid the hills. The children were told to keep away from the pool. Tomoko and her friend Kenji did not keep away. Each April they climbed down the rocks and dared each other to touch the whiskers that hung over the surface like wet silk. They never did. Instead the dragon rose under the cherry trees, scattering petals across the water, and asked each of them their name, then forgot them by summer.

Kenji did not come to the reunion. The organiser said he had sent a postcard with a single drawing on it, a coil of smoke and one pink flower. Tomoko turned it over and read the note on the back: The pool is dry now. I went down to see. The dragon had folded itself into the mud, its stripes faded to the colour of old brick, and it was waiting for someone to say its name properly.

Tomoko sat by the window until the lamps were lit. Then she walked to the river alone, unwrapped the jar, and set the blossom on the wet stones where the pool had been. The petals lifted on the cold air and drifted downstream, as if someone had finally let out a breath they had been holding for thirty years.