Full body suit design of a red Japanese dragon with yellow claws, chrysanthemums and clouds across the back, arms and thighs.

Red dragon full body suit design

Japanese · Back · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a red dragon coiling across a full body silhouette, with its head at the chest and its tail wrapping down towards the legs. Chrysanthemums in purple, blue and yellow sit among black and grey clouds and wave lines, and the dragon's scales are outlined in fine white and black linework. Bold red, yellow and blue ink dominates against a near-black background on a plain white page.

Japanese Back Upper arm Thigh Dragon Chrysanthemum Cloud Pearl Wave Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third day the sea lay flat as a tray, and still the dragon had not surfaced for the pearl. Old Mrs Tanabe, who had mended nets on the harbour wall since before the ferry came, knocked the ash from her pipe and told the boys to stop staring at the water. They stared anyway. Ren, the youngest, kept a cracked slate with the names of every boat that had gone past the breakwater and not come back.

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The pearl had rolled out of a storm cloud the winter the lighthouse burned. The dragon that came after it, red as a paper lantern and furious about the wind, had coiled itself round the headland to guard the stone. Nobody fished the cove after that. Chrysanthemums grew wild along the cliff path, purple and blue and yellow, and the village said they were the dragon's bribe, flowers to keep the children away from the rocks.

On the fourth morning Ren rowed out alone with a tin of rice and no net. He did not call out. He shipped the oars and let the swell lift him until the water below turned the colour of ink, and then the tail rose beside the boat, scales catching the light like a row of red coins. A claw as long as his arm settled on the gunwale. The pearl sat in the talons, dull and grey, no bigger than a hen's egg. It did not glow at all.

The dragon regarded him the way the sea regards a stone it has decided to keep. 'You came without a net,' it said. Ren slid the tin across the wood. Nobody in the village agreed afterwards on what else was said, only that the boat came home low in the water and the nets were full for a month. The next morning the tin was found empty on the harbour wall, with one blue chrysanthemum petal inside it and the sea rolling flat and easy below.