Flash design of a silver dragon coiling around an orange tiger that is mid-roar, with Chinese characters at the lower right, in Japanese-style tattoo artwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silver dragon and tiger design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A detailed drawing of a silver-grey dragon wrapped around an orange and black striped tiger, which is shown roaring with its claws raised. The dragon has feathered whiskers, scaled body and fin-like spines, with fine hatching and smooth shading on the scales and fur. Two vertical characters sit at the lower right, and the design is shown on a plain white background.

Japanese Dragon Tiger Claw Character Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The canvas had been rolled in the rafters of the Hessle Road shed for thirty years, and when Ada Pryce hauled it down that October the damp had eaten a pale bloom into the tiger's cheek. Nobody in the family could say who had painted the silver dragon. Her father had always called it the trade's best piece, and her uncle called it a bloody nuisance, because it took two men's shoulders to carry it from one booth to the next.

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She sat on an upturned crate with a pot of orange lead and a brush worn down to three hairs, working on the tiger's claws while the dragon watched from the wall, its feathered whiskers lifting in a draught nobody else could feel. Ruskin Vane had offered forty pounds for the pair of them the summer before, and her father had spat in the sawdust. The dragon belonged to the big rides and the tiger to the children's roundabout, and the two were never meant to share a pitch. Yet someone had stitched them together so that each seemed to need the other to keep from falling apart.

On the last night of the fair the generator died at half past nine. In the dark the lads hung the canvas from the scaffold to keep the rain off the stalls, and the wind got under it. Ada, leaning against the ticket box, swore the tiger's mouth opened a finger's width before the dragon's coils tightened around its ribs, as if the beast had waited all season for a reason to roar.

Ruskin came up the hill with a torch and found her laughing. He stood a long while under the wet cloth, then took off his cap. 'I'll not sell a tiger that's been roaring at my dragon since 1971,' he said. Ada handed him the brush and told him the claws still wanted a second coat.