Pastel-coloured Japanese-style dragon design winding around peony blossoms and leaves on a cream background, drawn as a flash piece.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pastel dragon and peonies design

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A dragon with a scaled body, clawed feet and a whiskered head coils vertically down the sheet, with its mouth open and horns swept back. Large pink and purple peony blossoms with green leaves fill the spaces around its body. Soft watercolour-style shading in pink, lilac, teal and peach sits over fine dark linework on a plain cream background.

Japanese Dragon Peony Flower Leaves Scale Claw Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pennock had kept the boarding house at the end of Gull Row for forty years, and she told every new guest the same thing about the dragon on the landing wallpaper. Sit down, love, you'll want to hear it properly. The paper was put up by her husband's father, who bought a job lot of it off a Lowestoft merchant the winter the harbour froze. Nobody in the town could say why a dragon should decorate a seaside hotel, but the old man swore the thing had come up out of the water one March night and asked him for a room.

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Well, he gave it the attic, being soft about creatures, and in the morning the attic was full of peonies. Pink ones, great heavy heads of them, pushing through the floorboards and dropping petals on the sea-coal. The dragon had coiled itself round the chimney stack, shaking its whiskers at the gulls, and it wanted nothing more than to be fed and left alone. So they fed it on bread soaked in tea, and it grew teal and silver along the back, and the lilac on its belly came from a bottle of violet cordial that spilled one Whitsun and never came out.

It left the year the war ended, through the skylight, taking half the slates with it. What it left behind was the paper, the one that still curls at the top of the stairs, and a single claw-mark on the newel post where it had gripped on the way out. I have never once let anyone dust that post. My husband said it was daft. I said let the dragon have its foothold. He's been gone eleven years now, and on wet afternoons I still hear something shifting above the attic, and I still leave the skylight a crack open for whatever comes back for its tea.