Full-colour Japanese style dragon design with grey scales, red flame-like swirls and yellow claws, grasping a black and white pearl, shown on a white background.

Japanese dragon with flaming pearl design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A coiled grey dragon with a spiked head, open jaws and yellow-tipped claws rises up the page, with one claw gripping a white sphere marked with a black character. The scales are finely shaded in black, grey and blue-grey, and the dragon is outlined in bold black linework. Red flame-like swirls and yellow claws add colour against the plain white background, which keeps the composition focused on the dragon.

Japanese Dragon Pearl Flame Claw Scale Horn Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass at Kessen had one road and one toll, and the toll was paid to the grey dragon that lived in the cloud above it. Old Ume the carter had paid it for thirty years with a sack of barley and never once looked up. This spring she had no barley, so she led her ox up the switchbacks at dusk and sat on a rock to wait for the weather to decide.

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The dragon came down slowly, the way wet washing sinks off a line. Its scales were the colour of pewter left out in rain, its jaw bristled with whiskers, and its horns made a crown of spikes. It did not roar. It asked what she carried. Ume said she carried nothing worth taking, only the ox and her dead husband's bell. The dragon's claw closed on something bright in the cloud, a pearl as white as a boiled egg, marked with a black character like a bird's foot pressed into ink.

"Give me the bell and I will give you the road," it said. Ume shook her head. The bell was for the ox, she said, so she would hear him in fog, and a road was no use to a woman alone if she could not find her beast on it. The dragon looked at her a long while. Then it did a thing the carters' songs never mention. It set the pearl down on the rock between them, and the red flames of its wake curled off it like smoke from a snuffed lamp.

Ume took the pearl home in her apron and never sold it. In the morning the pass was clear, and the bell rang on the ox all the way down to the valley. Every spring after, she climbed the switchbacks at dusk with the bell on her shoulder, and every spring the grey shape came down out of the cloud to watch her go by, and neither of them spoke of the toll.