Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a dragon and an eye with wave and cloud details on a lower leg, above black trainers with a floral swoosh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese dragon and eye tattoo on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two legs are shown from the calf down, with a large tattoo of a dragon on the outer leg and an eye surrounded by stylised waves and clouds on the other. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with strong reds, greens and blues against the skin. The subject is set against blurred green foliage, with black trainers and a floral-print swoosh in the lower frame.

Japanese Calf Dragon Eye Wave Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule refused the second bend, so Auntie Hanne sold it to a salt merchant at the foot of the Tegen pass and went up on foot with a copper box under her arm. Nobody in our valley would say what was inside. They said only that the dragon who sleeps in the cloud above the ridge had lost something in the spring thaw, and that whoever carried it back to the summit could ask the sky one question.

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I was twelve and had been told I was too young to climb. I followed three hours behind with a bag of dried plums and boots two sizes too big. Above the pines the rock turned the colour of wet slate and the wind came off the ridge in long grey sheets. Twice I lost the path. Twice a cloud, low and curling, drifted back to show me the way, its edges rolling over like the scrolled waves stitched on Hanne's old sailcloth bag.

At the summit she was kneeling on a flat stone with the lid of the box open. The eye inside was the size of a plum, green at the rim and blue at the centre, and when she lifted it toward the sky the cloud split and a head came down out of it, long and patient, its scales wet with mist. "Where is Tomas?" she asked. My uncle had walked off the Tegen road eleven winters earlier and never been found. The dragon blinked, slowly, and the whole mountainside seemed to blink with it. Then it answered in my grandmother's voice: "He is on the far side, still walking, as you were always going to have to."

Hanne laughed until she cried, then pressed the eye back into its box and snapped the lid shut. "Well," she said, tucking the box under her arm, "that's the question answered, and I don't have to carry it any further." We started down the far slope together, and I did not look back at the cloud, because I had been told that was the one rule of the pass, and because I could already hear her humming.