Black and grey Japanese-style dragon design surrounded by swirling clouds and cherry blossoms, drawn as a tattoo flash sheet.

Japanese dragon with clouds and blossom

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A coiled dragon with a horned head, open jaws and scaled body fills the tall frame, with wispy whiskers and mane. Clouds, cherry blossom flowers and curling wave-like wisps surround the dragon. Bold outlines are shaded with grey wash and solid black accents, with no colour ink.

Japanese Dragon Cloud Cherry blossom Wave Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wallpaper in room seven had been loosening since the equinox gales, and by the third week of October you had peeled enough of it to find the dragon. It was inked straight onto the plaster above the wardrobe, horns curved like cutlass blades, mouth open on a roar nobody had heard in forty years. Mrs Pennock, who ran the house on Lantern Row with a ledger and a tin of instant coffee, said the last lodger had been a rigger off the Dogger Bank boats. He had drawn it himself with a pen from the bar and left before the tide turned, owing three weeks.

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You stood on the bed with a putty knife and followed the scales with your thumb. The clouds were the worst of it, each one shaded grey and gone brown where the damp had got in. Every night the sea climbed the steps of the terrace and rattled the sash, and every night the dragon seemed ready to climb down and go out through the window to meet it. The blossom along its back had been drawn with more care than anything else, five petals each, the way a man draws something for someone he does not expect to see again.

On your last night you found a folded sheet tucked behind the wardrobe's back panel, written in pencil and addressed to nobody. It said only that the sea was a long way round and the dragon knew the road. You read it twice, then sat with the knife across your knees until the tide turned.

In the morning you left the room as you found it, the dragon half-skinned and watching the door, and paid Mrs Pennock in exact change. She asked whether you had seen it properly. You said you had, and that the tail was still going somewhere.