Modern Japanese Tattoo Pictures
Japanese dragons mean different things to different people, and tattoo culture in the modern United States seems to be morphing away from what dragons represented in traditional Japanese texts, like the Kojiki and Nihongi that were written all the way back in 7th and 8th century Japan and earlier.
You can tell whether a dragon is Japanese, Chinese or Korean by how many toes it has on its feet. Chinese dragons have five toes, whereas Korean ones have four toes and Japanese dragons have only three toes. In Chinese mythology dragons represent wisdom and power. There are nine kinds of Chinese dragons, and each has a domain or a characteristic assigned to it — there are celestial, spiritual, earth, underworld, horned, winged, coiling and yellow dragons, and the king.
