Close-up of a colourful Japanese style lion dog tattoo with turquoise body, orange dots, gold swirling mane and green eyes on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Turquoise and gold lion dog tattoo

Japanese · Colour · Photo

A fierce lion dog with open jaws, bared fangs and green eyes faces forward, with a second partly visible guardian figure at the left edge. The linework is bold and outlined, with the turquoise body shaded in lighter and darker tones and decorated with orange dots. The gold mane is rendered in swirling curls against the dark skin tone, filling the frame.

Japanese Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is only warm where you are, and I will tell you about the stone lions of Lantern Lane, which were carved before the lane had a name. There were two of them on either side of the temple gate, one with its mouth open to shout and one with its mouth shut to keep the shout in. The shouting one was called Teal by the children, because somebody's grandmother had painted his body that colour a hundred winters back and the paint had never quite given up. His mane was gilt, and the gilt curled like the smoke off a joss stick.

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One night in the wet month of plum rain, a boy named Wen Kao climbed the wall to steal a lantern from the shrine. The lantern was not a lantern at all but a cracked jade bead the priest kept to pay the lion's keep, and Wen Kao did not know this. He got as far as the lion's paw. Teal did not growl. He only rolled one green eye and let the boy look into the open jaws, where the stone teeth were chipped and the tongue was pink as a peach.

Wen Kao came down the wall with nothing in his hands but a spray of rain and the certainty that he had been seen. Forty years later he kept a shop of brushes on the far side of the river, and every morning he painted one orange dot on the doorframe, because he could never remember how many spots the lion had worn.