Black linework flash drawing of a Japanese-style dragon coiling among peony, cherry blossom, wave and cloud motifs, with no body placement shown.

Japanese dragon with peonies and cherry blossoms

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A dragon with a whiskered head and open jaws coils across the page, its body covered in detailed scale patterns and finned edges. Peonies, cherry blossoms, falling petals, wave and cloud motifs fill the spaces around its body. The drawing uses clean black outlines and fine hatching on a plain white background, with no colour or shading.

Japanese Dragon Peony Cherry blossom Petal Wave Cloud Scale Whiskers

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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

Pass the lamp down here, Tomi, and mind the wet step. Nobody in Hanamura climbs the Kiri bridge after dark unless they want the river dragon to see their face. You can laugh. My grandmother laughed too, the summer the Ozawa boy dared her, and she came home with her hair full of petals and no memory of the walk.

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The dragon was old when the rice was young. It had a whiskered head like a bad-tempered fox and a body that ran under three villages, its scales as close as fish-roe and its fins fluttering whenever the wind came off the hills. Where it turned in the shallows the water curled up in waves like the ones painted on the lacquer boxes, and peony petals drifted down from nowhere, red and heavy as wet silk.

Sato, the potter's girl, was the one who went up to the bridge with a bowl of plum wine and a question. Her father's kiln had cracked three times that season. She asked the dragon why the clay would not hold, and the dragon, which had heard every foolish question since the mountains were soft, opened its jaws and told her to stop asking the river for what her own hands should give. She came down with a cherry blossom caught in her sleeve, and the kiln never cracked again.

So when you hear the wind go still and the petals start to fall in the wrong month, put the lamp out and go home. The dragon is only turning over in its sleep, and it has a long memory for people who come to the bridge asking for things.