Japanese style tattoo of a red and grey dragon with open jaws and claws, its head on the chest and its body wrapping over the shoulder and upper arm.

Red and grey dragon across chest and shoulder

Japanese · Chest · Colour · Photo

A dragon with an open-mouthed head sits on the chest, with its body and clawed forelimbs curling over the shoulder and down the upper arm. The outlines are bold black, with grey shading on the scales and head and red and orange used for the fins, mouth, claws and flame-like shapes. The design fills the frame against plain skin with a dark background at the top right.

Japanese Chest Shoulder Dragon Claw Scale Teeth Flame Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You were the one who dropped the lantern, so you were the one who saw it first. The quay was black with rain and the tide had turned early, and out past the breakwater something lifted the water into a grey ridge, then a head, then a mouth opening wide enough to swallow the bell buoy whole.

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Its fins were the colour of rust and sunset, and the spines along its neck spread like the frill of a fire nobody could put out. Old Mrs Penhallow at the chandlery always said the sea dragon had only one rule: take what you are owed and not a fish more. You had laughed at that for forty years. Now you stood with your boots in the wet and understood she had been describing a bargain.

The creature did not come for the boats. It hooked one clawed forelimb over the harbour wall, orange talons scraping the granite, and looked at you with eyes like two coins of fire. You remembered the debt your father had made with the tide, a net of silver herring in exchange for a calm winter. You had never paid it. Now the jaw gaped and a single pale tooth caught the lamplight.

You did what your father taught you and held out the only thing you had, the brass compass from your coat, its needle spinning wild. The dragon took it as gently as a gull takes bread and folded its great body back into the dark. By morning the nets were full and every boat that week came home heavy. On the stone steps a single orange scale lay where a claw had rested, and you still keep it in your pocket, warm even in January.