Colour tattoo of a pink and orange dragon with horns and whiskers coiling down the upper thigh, in a Japanese-influenced style.

Pink dragon coiled around a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large dragon with a open-mouthed head, whiskers and clawed feet coils from the upper thigh down the leg. Its body is packed with scale texture in pink and red, edged with bold dark outlines, with orange-yellow highlights along the body. The dragon fills the frame diagonally against bare skin and red fabric.

Japanese Traditional Thigh Dragon Scale Whiskers Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dragon of Hollin Water had been pink for as long as the old women could remember, which they said was the colour of something fed on rose petals and spite. Each spring it came up the ditch from the marsh, shedding scales onto the reeds, and each spring the village tied a goat with red wool and left it on the bank so the lambs would be spared.

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One year the goat was refused. Tamsin Yeo, who kept the mill and believed only in things she could weigh, went down to the water alone with a sack of salt and a pair of shears. The dragon lifted its head out of the sedge, whiskers trailing like wet string, and asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted some of its scales. It laughed, a sound like a gate swinging in the wind, and told her the scales were not for sale.

So she bargained. She offered it the one thing the village had never given it, which was a name. Nobody had bothered. It had been called the Wyrm, the Pink Thing, and worse. The dragon considered this for a long while, coiling its tail around the alder roots until the water rose, and then it said her name back to her slowly, the way you test ice. Tamsin went home without the salt.

At the school reunion that autumn, held in the mill hall, a man with grey at his temples asked Tamsin's granddaughter why the sign by the ditch still read only THE DRAGON. She said the family had never got round to asking it what it wanted calling. Out past the hall windows the water moved, pink under the lamps, and somewhere in the sedge a name was being tried out, slowly.