Black and grey pencil drawing of a coiling Japanese-style dragon with scaled body, clawed feet and wispy cloud-like flames, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese dragon design in graphite

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A coiling dragon with a scaled serpentine body, clawed feet and long whiskers fills the page, with its head at the lower centre and a second curl of body above. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading on the scales and body to create depth, and wispy cloud or flame shapes trail around the figure. The drawing is rendered entirely in greys on a pale background, with no colour.

Japanese Dragon Scale Claw Cloud Whiskers Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell at Kurogane pass had cracked in the third year of drought, and Tomoe the bell-founder was the only one in the valley willing to climb up and see why. She found the dragon coiled three times around the shrine's old cedar, its scales the grey of wet slate, its whiskers hanging over the path like tangled rope. Smoke drifted from its nostrils, but it did not burn. It was too tired to burn.

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"You have been ringing my bell," it said, in a voice like rocks settling far down a slope. "Every dawn for forty years, and every dawn I have heard you wanting rain." Tomoe set down her hammer. She had poured that bell herself from bronze salvaged from three closed mines, and she had never once asked the sky for anything she could not weigh in her hands.

"Then stop wanting it," the dragon said. "The clouds you see are mine. I keep them the way a fisherman keeps his nets, and I have let them go slack because nobody below would climb up to ask." Its claws, each as long as a plough blade, dug furrows into the moss. Tomoe unslung her satchel, took out a chipped cup of rice wine and poured it over the nearest talon. The dragon laughed, and the laugh shook loose a grey sheet of rain that fell on the valley for three days.

When she carried the bell back down, it still had its crack. She hung it anyway, and every dawn it rang a little flatter. On clear mornings the mist still unspooled from the cedar in long pale ribbons, as if someone up there were still holding the end of a rope.