Pencil sketch of a Japanese-style dragon with claws, whiskers and a scaled body, drawn in blue and red pencil for a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese dragon design in pencil

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A line drawing of a Japanese-style dragon with a horned head, open snarling mouth, clawed forefeet and a long scaled body coiling behind it. The linework is drawn in blue and red pencil with some areas of crosshatching on the body and wave-like swirls in the background. The composition is a tall vertical sheet, with the dragon's head and claws filling the lower half and the coils winding up to the top right.

Japanese Dragon Claw Scale Wave Horn

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got into the sketch before Uncle Dez could finish the claws, so the dragon went up on the ghost train front with its feet still only pencil. Blue for the bones of it, red for where the paint would sit. He drew everything twice that way, once to see it and once to believe it, and the fair folk called him the Pencil Man because he never trusted a wall until he'd gone over it in lead.

Keep reading

We were pitched on the hard standing behind the dodgem track that autumn, the generator coughing through the night and the wind off the flats pushing the canvas in and out like breath. Every morning I climbed the ladder with a jar of water and a rag, rubbing at the blue lines to see which ones he'd meant to keep. The waves were the hardest. He had swirled them round the dragon's belly so they looked like they were pulling it down into the grass.

On the last Sunday, with the fair packing up for Doncaster, I found him sitting on the cider crate with his boots off, staring at the drawing as if somebody had drawn it and owed him money. "It wants a sea under it," he said. "Not a fairground. A sea." So I took the blue pencil from his tin and drew one wave, badly, along the bottom edge where the claws should have been. He laughed and said it was the first honest thing anybody had put on that front all season.

When the lorries rolled out in the morning, the rain had washed the blue off the ladder rungs and left the red standing. Under the wet, the dragon looked like something a child had painted in a hurry, who knew exactly where the teeth were going.