Back of a woman with a large Japanese dragon and cloud tattoo, with colourful peony and chrysanthemum sleeves on her arms.

Japanese dragon back piece with peonies

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman seen from behind lies on a bed, with long dark hair falling over one shoulder and a red ribbon tied at her neck and waist. A large dragon among clouds covers her back, rendered in black and grey shading with red and tan highlights. Her arms are covered in colourful peonies, chrysanthemums and leaves in pink, green and blue against dark shading.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon came up out of the Ōi river the spring the peonies in Kōzu failed, and it did not hurry. Its scales were the grey of wet slate, edged with a rust that caught the light whenever it turned its head. Clouds gathered behind it like washing left out too long, heavy and unwilling to leave, and the boatmen said afterwards they had never seen rain so patient.

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Hana Nakagawa kept the lantern shop at the bridge end. She had sold paper lanterns for the autumn festival for thirty years and knew every hinge of the trade, so when the dragon stopped at her doorway and asked, very politely, for a single bloom to wear, she did not laugh. She went to the back garden where the last red peony was hiding under a sheet of old oilcloth, cut it with the small scissors she used for silk, and carried it out in both hands.

The dragon took it on its tongue as gently as a monk takes the host, then coiled once around the chrysanthemums on the hill temple, their leaves curling in its wake. Where its tail passed over the ferns they turned silver. The rain it had been carrying broke over the valley all at once, and the paddies drank it down to the roots.

Hana kept the scissors. Every spring after, when the peonies came early and fat along the bridge, she went out before dawn to cut the first one and laid it on the water for whatever still swam below the clouds. Nobody in Kōzu asked her why. They simply carried their cracked lanterns to her shop to be mended.

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