Full-colour Japanese style flash design of a green spotted lion dog beside a pink peony, set among black and grey waves and swirling clouds.

Peony and lion dog back piece design

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a green, white-spotted lion dog with orange swirl cloud motifs, a large pink peony with green leaves, and a red and gold patterned ball with a small black calligraphy mark. The design is framed by black and grey stylised waves and cloud scrolls, with bold black outlines and white highlights. Colour ink dominates, with black and grey used for the background waves and clouds.

Japanese Peony Wave Cloud Flower Leaves Calligraphy Ball

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion dog on the gatepost at Hollin Pit had been green for as long as I could remember, though my mother swore it was plain grey stone when she married my father. Old Tobias Venn repainted it every spring with pigment he bought from a sailor's widow in Hull, and every spring the spots came out a little whiter, as if the stone were trying to remember something it had once known.

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The morning the seam gave its first groan, I was sent up the bank with a can of tea for my brother Joe. The gatepost was sweating. Drops ran down the green and gathered in the carved gold curls, and when I laid my palm on the open mouth the cold came through like a lamp had gone out inside it. Tobias was already there, peony red on his cuffs, bellowing down the shaft for the men to come up.

Nobody argued with him that day. Forty-one men climbed the ladders in the order they were called, and the last of them, Joe, stopped at the gate to touch the painted ball beneath the dog's paw. Then the ground spoke, low and long, like something huge turning over in its sleep, and the engine house chimney split clean down its middle and lay across the lane.

Afterwards the village said the dog had saved us. Tobias only said he had been paid in peonies. The next spring I took his brushes up the bank and added one white spot for every man who walked home that week. I ran out of paint before I ran out of men, so I left the last patch bare, for whoever would climb up next.