Red-brown line drawing of a Japanese dragon coiling through wisps of cloud, with cherry blossoms, as a tattoo design sketch.

Japanese dragon with cherry blossoms

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A coiling Japanese-style dragon is drawn in fine reddish-brown outline, with scale detail along its body, a clawed foot and a roaring head with whiskers and horns. Cherry blossom flowers and flowing wisps of cloud or flame fill the spaces around the dragon. The composition is a tall, open design on a plain white background, with no shading beyond the linework.

Japanese Dragon Cherry blossom Cloud Flame Scale Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river at Kessaro had frozen only once in living memory, and that winter the dragon Ushi-no-Hana came down from the mountain to see why. Nobody in the village would go near the ice. Old Tomeko's grandson, Ren, was eleven and had never been afraid of anything he could not yet see, so he walked out on the grey shelf of it with a bucket of salt fish and a loaf of rye.

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The dragon was lying in the reeds with her head on the bank, and her whiskers had frost in them like seed pearls. Her horns were cracked where the cold had got into them. When she opened her mouth to speak, a little cloud of breath came out and drifted over the water, and the cloud had petals in it, pink and white, though it was the wrong season for blossom.

"You are not afraid," she said.

"I am a little," said Ren. "But the fish will go off if I carry it back."

She considered this for a long time. Then she curled her long body around the little hut where the boy's family slept, the way a cat settles against a stove, and the ice along the bank began to sweat and go soft. Ren sat with his back against one of her scales, which were warm as bread, and ate his rye while the dark came down.

In spring the blossom came to Kessaro in the usual way, and the dragon went back up the mountain. Ren never told anyone what she had said about the fish. He only said that the river was never quite so cold again.