Japanese style dragon tattoo in red, orange and cream over dark green-black scale ground, across a hip and thigh with a white cloth wrapped around the waist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and green dragon on hip and thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large dragon winds across the hip and thigh, with its scaled body and clawed foreleg shown in red, orange and cream outlines. The background is packed with a dark green-black fish-scale pattern, and red cloud-like shapes sit higher up near the back. Bold, traditional shading and a tight, dense composition fill the frame against a plain black backdrop.

Traditional Japanese Thigh Back Dragon Scale Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The river below the orchard at Hollin Fold ran so low that summer that the carp lay in its shallows like coins nobody wanted. Old Maud Penrose kept the watergate there, and every evening she walked down with a bucket of bran to call them up, and every evening the dragon in the reeds watched her do it.

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Nobody in the village had seen it properly. They saw a red crest among the willows, a flicker of scale under the weir, and once a tail as wide as a cart shaft slapping the mud. Her brother Tom said it was a trick of the light on the wet stones. Her mother said it was the old lord's gift to the water, and that it would stay as long as the fish did.

In August the fish began to go. Maud found them belly up on the gravel, and then she found the dragon itself, coiled in the cool under the sluice gate, its green-black scales gone dull as slate. Its foreleg was caught in a length of rope some careless boy had left on the bank. The white cloth of her grandmother's wash, which had blown off the line that morning, was snagged round its hip like a bandage.

She did not run. She knelt in the silt, sawed the rope with her grandmother's bread knife, and talked to it the way she talked to the goats. When the leg came free, the dragon lifted its head and looked at her with an eye as round and grave as the moon over the mill.

The next morning the river was full again, and the carp came up to the bran as if nothing had happened. Maud still left a scrap of the white cloth on the sluice rail each evening. Nobody asked her why, and she never said.