Japanese-style dragon tattoo with red clouds and black scales wrapping down a leg from the thigh to the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese dragon leg tattoo

Japanese · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large dragon with an open mouth and horns is coiled down the outside of a leg, with its head near the upper thigh and its body running to the calf. The black scales are finely shaded and the dragon is outlined in bold black linework, set against red flame or cloud shapes. Red and yellow accents stand out against the black and grey, and the photo is taken outdoors on a pavement from a low angle.

Japanese Thigh Calf Dragon Cloud Flame Scale Horn Leg

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 cedar roots had heaved the path into steps again, and Tomoe counted them the way her grandmother had taught her, one for every spring the river took a boat. Nineteen, then the bend, then the stone with its rope of rice straw gone grey. She set down the lacquered bowl of rice cakes and wiped her palms on her apron. Above the ridge, cloud the colour of cooked persimmon was boiling up over the trees.

Keep reading

Everyone in Sakuragi knew the dragon slept under the ridge pond. Her grandmother said it had come up through the rice fields the year the rain stopped, and that it had been fed each autumn since, so it would keep its scales black and its temper low. Tomoe had never believed it, not properly, until the pond water rose to meet her boots and a head as long as a plough came out of the mist, horns combed back, its mouth open and full of little fires.

It did not eat her. It looked at the rice cakes, then at the comb sticking out of her hair, the one with the gold maple leaves her mother had left her. 'That is not food,' it said, in a voice like a bell underwater. 'Give me the thing you are most afraid to lose.' She took the comb out and held it up, and the flames along its spine dimmed to the colour of embers. It curled once around the stone, and the cloud over the ridge tore open.

When she came down the steps that evening, the terraces were soaked and the rice was standing green again. Her grandmother was waiting at the gate with her hands folded, looking at Tomoe's bare hair and not asking. Nobody in the village ever found the comb. Tomoe still climbs to the stone each autumn with the rice cakes, and on the days the ridge clouds go red, she feels something watching her from under the water, politely waiting for its turn.