Colour flash design of a monkey king in gold and green armour holding a staff, with red dragons, leaves and waves, in Japanese style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monkey king with red dragons and golden staff

Japanese · Colour · Flash

The design shows a roaring monkey warrior in ornate armour and a gold crown, gripping a golden staff while a red dragon coils around his legs and another rises behind his shoulder. Leaves and a wave-filled grey background frame the figure. The linework is bold and clean, with shaded scales, feathers and armour plates, and the palette is dominated by red, gold and green against black and grey.

Japanese Dragon Armour Staff Wave Leaves Crown Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eel clerk came up the mountain with his fins shaking and the Dragon King's warning still stuck in his throat. Tell the Great Sage, he said at last, that the sea wants its measuring rod back. The monkey laughed so hard that pine needles dropped from the branches and settled in the clerk's wet hair. He had found the rod on the seabed years ago, a gold shaft that grew when you wanted it to and shrank when you didn't, and he had been using it ever since to prod at clouds and poke holes in the sky.

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He went down to the shore in a borrowed set of armour, lacquered plates over a green silk coat, and a crown he had taken from a gatekeeper who was too busy napping to object. The waves were already rising to meet him. Two red dragons came out of the foam, one coiling around his shins like a cat around a fishmonger's stall, the other lifting its head behind his shoulder to hiss at the sky. Their scales were red as lantern paper and every one of them had an edge. He bared his teeth at them and shouted until the water went flat.

The Dragon King arrived at noon with his court trailing behind him like a wedding procession. Give it back, he said, and the monkey offered him the rod with both hands. When the King reached for it, the monkey wound the shaft down to the length of a hairpin and slid it behind his ear. Then he sat on a rock, pulled a peach from his sleeve, and began to eat it while the tide went out without anyone's permission.

By evening the dragons had given up and gone home to sulk. Ask the mountain what became of the sea, and it will tell you only that the waves kept coming back to the shore all that week, each one curling its foam into the shape of a monkey's grin.