Black and grey Japanese dragon tattoo with clouds and kanji covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Japanese dragon on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large dragon coils across the upper arm and shoulder, its scaled body and clawed limbs rendered in outline with soft grey shading. Stylised clouds and wind lines fill the background, with kanji characters, a cherry blossom and a pale circular motif placed around the dragon. The design is in black ink and greys, shown in a close, evenly lit photograph of the arm.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Dragon Cloud Kanji Blossom Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had been dead for eleven days when Teodor Mackie first saw the dragon come down out of the cloud bank to the east. He stood at the rail with a tin cup of cold tea and watched its long body unspool across the sky, scales catching a light the sea did not seem to have. Nobody else looked up. The bosun was counting coils of rope and the cook was swearing at a pan of burnt porridge.

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Its head turned toward the becalmed barque, and the hair lifted along Teodor's forearms the way it does before a squall. The dragon did not bring thunder. It breathed out, long and slow, and the flat grey water creased in every direction at once. Within the hour the canvas had filled, the pennant snapped straight, and Captain Holm, who had never admitted to being wrong in his life, was bellowing for the mizzen to be set.

The price came the following dawn, when the ship's boy, Sato, who had joined at Yokohama and never spoke above a murmur, was found standing at the bow with his face turned up. "It asks for a name," he said, and his English was suddenly perfect. "Only one. It will carry it past the edge of the charts." Nobody argued. Teodor watched the boy's lips move, and a pale disc of cloud, like a moon that had forgotten the night, drifted over the masthead and swallowed the words whole.

That evening Teodor wrote in the log: Wind given on the eleventh day. Sato's name taken east. He underlined the date twice and went up on deck. Above him the clouds were still moving, though no one aboard the Marigold could say which way.