Black and grey Japanese style illustration of a woman in a patterned kimono holding a dragon, with a tattoo-style design on her upper arm and a parasol behind her.

Kimono woman with dragon and parasol

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Flash

A woman in a patterned kimono holds a detailed dragon, which is coiled around her tattooed arm. Behind her are a parasol and a folding fan painted with a tiger, and the kimono is decorated with wave and floral motifs. The work uses fine ink linework and soft grey shading, with small touches of warm tan on the dragon and fabric.

Japanese Upper arm Woman Kimono Dragon Fan Tiger Flower Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The inspector at the Vell crossing had unfolded the painted fan twice, and both times the tiger seemed to have shifted nearer the edge of the paper. Ilse Maro told herself it was the lamplight bending off the river. She had worked the night shift long enough to know that lamplight never made anything crawl.

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The dealer waited with the parasol across his knees, its oiled ribs ticking each time he breathed. Dragons were allowed through Vell provided they came as ornament, and his papers listed a lacquered box, a parasol of paper, and a fan. The box had a dragon coiled around its lid, its scales picked out in tan and grey. When Ilse lifted the lid, the hinge gave a sound like a chain paying out, and she saw that the lining had been cut away to make a pocket.

In the pocket lay a sheet of rice paper drawn with tide marks, each wave line running upriver toward the old ford. Her colleague wanted the whole thing stamped as ornament and waved through before the bell. Ilse looked again at the fan. The tiger's eye was not on the viewer at all. It pointed north, past the ford, to the place where the river forked and the water ran shallow enough for a cart.

She stamped the manifest and slid the box back across the table. "Ornament," she said. The dealer bowed and tucked the fan into his sleeve. Behind him, on the far bank, a single lantern went out, and the tiger, folded away with the rest, was already walking north.