Realistic black and grey biomechanical dragon with spread wings and a glowing red mouth, with red flames along the bottom, tattooed across a man's back.

Biomechanical dragon across a full back piece

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a biomechanical dragon with a segmented, armoured body, spread wings and an open jaw with red glowing details. The shading is highly detailed and smooth, with grey smoke and mist behind the creature, and the lower section is filled with red and orange flames. The composition fills the whole back from the shoulders to the waistband, with the colour concentrated in the flames and the mouth.

Realism Back Dragon Biomechanical Wing Flame Smoke Claw Armour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that one's been loose since the storm of '52. Right, sit yourselves down. You want the dragon of Pellow Quay, and you'll not get it from the lads at the Anchor, who only know the bit about the gold. I'm telling it the way my gran told it to me, sat on this same bollard with her boots off.

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Long before the breakwater, the sea below Pellow had a fire under it. The old men would say the dragon rose out of that fire wearing the bones of every ship it had swallowed, plate over plate, ribs of iron from the Margaret Ann and a jaw hinged with chain. Its wings were sails that had never been stitched, and when it breathed, the mist off the water went orange at the edges. Fishermen rowing out at dusk swore they heard it counting the lamps along the front, one by one, as if taking a register.

Then came Tamsin Roe, a net-mender with no patience and a lamp she would not put out. She rowed to the rocks alone with a bucket of salt herring and a sack of old rivets, and she sat on the wet stone until the thing lifted its head out of the smoke. 'You're not the only one who's been patched,' she told it. 'Look at my hands.' It lowered its jaw onto the kelp, slow as a tide, and she began, rivet by rivet, to close the gaps in its armour where the storms had split it.

By morning the harbour was quiet and the dragon had gone back under, but every boat in Pellow came home with its hull mended, and the lamp on the rocks stayed lit for forty years. If you go down there tonight, you'll see a glow in the water. That's not fire. That's Tamsin's lamp, still being kept.