Two photographs on a magazine page show a bare male torso with a black and grey Japanese style tiger with red accents on the ribs and a dragon and cloud sleeve on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Japanese tiger and dragon sleeve on torso

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two photographs of a bare male torso show Japanese style tattoos, with a tiger on the side of the ribs and a dragon among clouds across the upper arm and shoulder. The tiger has bold outlines and red accents, while the sleeve is mostly dark grey and black shading with lighter cloud forms. The second photo is a closer, lower crop of the same sleeve on a torso, with a warm yellow and orange tone visible in the lower area.

Japanese Upper arm Ribs Tiger Dragon Cloud Sleeve Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold that lamp steady and stop fidgeting, boy. Every one of you wants the tiger and none of you wants to wait for him. Fine. Off the coast of Shikoku there was a fishing boat called the Hidden Heron, and her skipper, Ume Tanabe, had a rule lacquered in red over the wheelhouse door: never sail into cloud you cannot see the bottom of.

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One autumn his son broke that rule. The boy could not bear to go home empty-handed to a wife who counted every sen, so he took the boat past the headland where the cloud sat down on the water like wet wool. Somewhere in that grey a tiger rose out of the swell, striped like a torii gate in the rain. It looked at the boy the way a teacher looks at a pupil who has finally asked the right question.

The dragon came after, climbing the cloud as if it were a staircase, its scales the colour of old iron with a thread of yellow glowing beneath them. It said nothing. It lowered its head until the boy could see a net snagged on one horn. He untangled it, because his hands knew the work, and the net came up heavy with silver mackerel that had never been in those waters before.

Ume never wrote the rule down again. He scraped the red lacquer off the door and left the wood bare, and when the crew asked why, he only said that a man's own rules were the only ones worth breaking, and that the oil was nearly gone, so they should all go to bed.