Japanese style full back tattoo design in colour, showing a blue oni demon, a dragon head and a scaled serpent with red claws on a torso outline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Oni and dragon full back design

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Flash

A full back design drawn on a torso outline, centred on a blue oni demon with gold curled hair that holds a white cloth. A grey dragon head sits at the top right, and a large brown and red scaled serpent wraps around the figure, ending in clawed red feet. A spiky, feathered bird-like creature and a red flower fill the lower centre, with bold black outlines and shading.

Japanese Back Demon Dragon Serpent Bird Claw Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrow Court had not worked since the spring, so Mrs Adebayo carried her shopping up nine flights and talked to the blue man painted on the stairwell wall while she climbed. He had been there longer than she had. The council painted over graffiti every summer, but nobody had the heart to touch the oni on the landing between the fourth and fifth floors, with his gold curls and his white cloth held high like a flag of surrender nobody had asked for.

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One November the serpent came. Not a real one, the boys from the seventh floor swore, though they swore it with their hands up and their eyes wide. A long brown scaled thing had crept out of the bin store and up the drainpipe, red-footed and clawed, and it coiled round the stairwell rail as if it owned the building. Mrs Adebayo, who had buried a husband and raised three sons on this estate, told them to fetch a broom and stop being daft. She went to bed that night with the window open, which she never did, because the air smelled of rain and sawdust and something older than both.

In the morning the dragon head was gone from the top of the stairs, and in its place sat a grey stone face with its mouth open, as though it had been waiting for someone to answer. The bird-thing was nowhere to be seen. The only trace was a single red flower laid on the third step, fresh as if picked that minute. Mrs Adebayo bent, slowly, because her knees were not what they had been, and picked it up. Then she climbed the rest of the way with her shopping, nodding to the blue man as she passed, and told him that the lift would be fixed by Christmas, which was a lie, and that the serpent could stay if it kept the pigeons off the balcony, which was not.