Black and white line drawing of a tiger and a dragon around a yin yang circle, above a pavilion roof and stacked bars, shown as a design with no body placement.

Tiger and dragon with yin yang design

Black and grey · Flash

A black and white line drawing shows a crouching tiger on the left and a coiled dragon on the right, both set among stylised clouds. Above a pavilion roof sits a large circle with a yin yang symbol inside a patterned ring, and a vertical column of stacked broken and solid bars runs down the centre. The linework is clean and bold, with dense scale and hatching detail on the dragon and tiger stripes, and the composition is symmetrical around the central column.

Tiger Dragon Yin yang Cloud Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My grandmother kept the lamp on the pavilion roof above the fish market, and she never let anyone climb up to it but me. The tiger lived in the cloud-shaped gap under the eaves, and the dragon lived out past the breakwater, and the two of them had not spoken since the winter the sea wall cracked and nobody could agree whose stones had gone missing.

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Every evening she climbed the ladder with a tin of black paint and added one more mark to the column beside the stair. A solid bar for a boat that came home full, a broken bar for one that came home light. Six bars made a stack, then she started again at the bottom. I thought it was a ledger until she pointed up at the great ring above the roof, the black and white halves chasing each other round its middle, and said the sea and the hill had always kept accounts with each other like that.

The storm that November brought the dragon in over the water, all wet scales and lantern-light, and the tiger came down off the clouds with its teeth bared. They argued over the lamp as if it were a bone. My grandmother only sat on the tiles with her knitting and waited. At last the dragon asked her why she would not give the light to someone with the strength to hold it. She said the lamp belonged to whoever was still out on the water at dawn, and went back to her needles.

By morning the dragon had coiled itself down into the harbour mouth and the tiger had gone back to its clouds, grumbling. The lamp was still burning, though neither of them had touched it. When I climbed the ladder with the paint, the top bar on the wall was already solid, and the rain had run down the tiles and left a thin white line where the two of them had almost touched.