Colour tattoo of a teal dragon head with green eyes, purple accents and yellow claws, in a Japanese style, on a lower leg, shown in a two-panel photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal dragon head on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

A teal-scaled dragon head with a fierce expression, green eyes, a open mouth showing fangs and a pink tongue, and clawed paws below. Bold black outlines, fine whisker-like strokes and smooth colour shading give the creature depth, against a pale blue backdrop in the photo. The image is a side-by-side pair of close shots, with the design filling most of the frame.

Japanese Neo-trad Calf Dragon Creature Claw Fangs Whiskers Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the brazier, it spits when the wind comes off the tarn. Brother Anselm kept the keys to the lower cellar, and every winter he went down with a lamp and came up with less wine than he had carried. Nobody saw a thing. The abbot grew tired of the sums and sent to the coast for a painter, a thin woman called Mercy Lowe who had done ships' figureheads and knew how to make wood look as though it might bite.

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She came up the valley in October with her brushes in a biscuit tin and a pot of teal she had mixed herself from copper and gall. She painted the dragon on the gatehouse wall in a single long week. Its head filled the arch, horns swept back like the bare branches over the road, and its jaws hung open with a pink tongue rolled out to taste the air. The monks stood in the yard and said it would frighten the devil off. Then she came to the eyes, and she stopped, and asked the abbot to bring her the thief.

It was Anselm's own nephew, a boy of eleven who had been sneaking down the ladder every night to share the wine with the mule. He stood shaking with a stolen jug in his arms while Mercy Lowe dipped her finest brush in gold and painted the pupils, slow as a confession. 'There,' she said. 'Now it watches the cellar stairs. It won't drink, but it will know who does.'

The boy never touched the cellar again. Each winter after, when the wind came off the tarn and the fire spat, the monks would look up at the gatehouse and see the dragon's green eyes catch the lamplight, and they would make sure the keys were hung on their hooks before compline. The mule, I am told, grew very fat on apples.